The Libya Connection (6 page)

Kennedy jogged through the night, listening to the sounds of his own labored breathing.

The village of Bishabia, and gunfire, receded to lower ground behind him. He was moving in a zigzag course toward the walls of Leonard Jericho's villa a quarter mile away. He planned a slip back in via his office window. He would bluff his way out of this, whatever happened.

Kennedy's main concern was Mike Rideout. Or whatever the guy's real name was. Kennedy had little doubt that "Rideout" would be hot on his trail, and closing fast, at this very moment.

Kennedy paused when the ground suddenly angled downward. The village lights and activity dipped out of sight behind him.

The merc swung around and crouched, listening. He was sure he could hear very light footfalls gaining on him, rapidly approaching from the direction of the village.

Kennedy estimated his pursuer to be about one hundred yards away. Time enough to set a trap.

He unhitched the compact transceiver from his belt. The radio was Kennedy's contact to Doyle and the other mercs in the villa. Kennedy knew Doyle would be going berserk trying to raise him on the radio the minute they heard the uproar from the village and couldn't find Kennedy. There would be plenty of squawking over the transceiver right now.

Kennedy ran to a nearby ridge in the rock-and-sand terrain. He placed the transceiver in a shallow surface gully. He flicked a tiny switch, activating the unit. It started crackling.

Kennedy ran back to his previous position. He bellied out prone. He swung the Largo-Star machine gun around by its leather strap into firing posture. Less than fifteen seconds had elapsed since he first paused and listened for the sounds of Rideout's approach.

He would be waiting when the desert starlight silhouetted Rideout's approaching form.

"Boss! What the hell's going on? Do you read me? Are you in the village?"
The sounds from the transceiver crackled clearly in the night.
"Come in, goddammit!"

Enough time had passed, thought Kennedy. Where the hell is he?

"Right behind you." A cool voice answered his thoughts. "Drop your gun. Turn over slowly."

Kennedy swung around onto his back, the Largo-Star blazing.

Mack Bolan had not expected a man like Kennedy to be taken alive. Bolan tried. But the main thing was Bolan staying alive.
He had to find Eve.

He leaped aside in the instant of time it took Kennedy to twist around.

Kennedy's burst slashed across the space occupied by Rideout's voice. Except that the origin of the voice was moving as fast as a voice could carry across a still desert night, and had slipped out of target acquisition even as the words were sinking in.

Bolan had slid in one process from a voice in the dark to a guy who was out of the picture.

Now Kennedy's execution was fast work. The Galil in Bolan's grip thundered three times in rapid fire. For good measure. Three heavy slugs exploded through living matter, rendering it deceased, spinning Kennedy into a dead man's roll across the ground, leaving a glistening trail of bloodied sand in his wake.

Bolan shoulder-slung his own rifle and picked up the dead man's chopper and an extra ammo clip. Then he hotfooted to the spot where Kennedy's transceiver was still crackling.

Doyle's voice.

"Does anyone read me? Is anyone there?"

Bolan depressed the transmitting button, then started out of there.

"Yeah, yeah," he growled irritably. "Hold on to your shirt!" He was already jogging away from Kennedy's body as he spoke to Doyle. "I'm all right."

He was approximating Kennedy's speech pattern.

He counted on the airwaves and tension of the moment to do the rest. It did.

"Top, what the hell's going on down there?"
came Doyle's voice.
"Are you in the village? Do you need backup?"

"Negative. Get ready to lift off. Ten minutes from now, whether I'm back or not. The pilots have the coordinates?"

"I gave 'em the same ones you gave me. Whadaya mean, if you're not back?"

"I'll catch up," snarled Bolan. "Don't disobey orders. I have something for Mr. Jericho."

Which was true enough, figured Bolan. He arced around, back toward the village at a steady gallop, hoping like hell that ten minutes would be enough time.

Bolan could not make out the type of markings of the truck that had been sent out of the village to investigate his shots. His hearing told him it was a heavy-duty personnel carrier.

The machine was speeding in his direction, bumping across the rough ground.

No headlights.

That confirmed it for Bolan.

The bulky shape of the truck emerged from the gloom, along a route predicted by the Executioner who was crouched off to the side and out of the truck's way. He could discern four men riding in the back of the truck. The vehicle was crashing along at fifty or more miles per.

Bolan opened fire with the newly acquired Largo Star. He directed his initial stream of fire at the front cab of the racing truck. He could not see clearly into the cab. He didn't need to.

He heard shattering glass.

A scream.

He kept on firing. The lightweight machine gun stuttered in his fists, illuminating the desert night with its muzzle flashes.

The truck veered too sharply. The vehicle seemed to hang suspended in time and space for several moments in a sickening two-wheel tilt.

Shouts from the falling men in the back.

The lurching vehicle lost its battle with gravity. It flipped onto its side. Momentum still pushed the truck through the rock and sand in a grinding for ward plow.

Bolan closed in. He discerned a guy's body trapped between the vehicle and hard dirt as the truck skidded along, mashing that particular attacker's torso into hamburger amid a barely human squealing that ended very abruptly.

Bolan moved in on the remaining three hardguys. In the Terrorist Wars, it was shoot or be shot as soon as your cover was blown. That fact John Phoenix knew very well; its implacable message was carved in the flesh of the campaigns already, now, part of his history.

History spoke again as a blistering fire track spat from the Largo-Star into the three-man night, turning it into a howling dark hole of damnation and wet, sticky, glistening desert sand. Bone shards exploded from body sacks in the trajectory of the Largo-Star's death spew — and the night became death for three non-notable terror creeps, a night of darkness as everlasting as would be the kind of war that brings such death. The Terrorist Wars. The War of Evolution. Here, in this damned desert of hellfire and moaning death.

Bolan saw a man's open chest bubble in the starlight. Twenty feet away from him, the soldier had been opened from top to bottom.

He veered away from the killing ground after that. He closed in on the village from a new direction. A stopwatch in his mind kept track of the passing seconds. He gave himself seven more minutes to fix this paramilitary force that had dared penetrate deep into Libya and secrete the sort of cargo about to be airlifted from the Jericho villa.

The African force here might still try to rush the villa and acquire Kennedy's purloined cargo for themselves by force. The only way to avoid such a strategic misfortune would be to deal these troops a decisive blow now, while they were uncertain, before they had time to move right.

Bolan would chew through all of these double-dealers until he found Eve.

He would use the tunnel leading from the inn back to what had been Kennedy's office. There would be no one to guard that route. Not at the inn end, anyway. Those choppers were going to lift off and "Mike Rideout" wanted to be on board. Those aircraft and the cargo would be on their way to Lenny Jericho. And Santos. And Eve.

He reached the back wall of a mud house in the desert on the outskirts of the village. There would be civilian faces at the front windows of the house, facing the activity of the remaining soldiers in the central street and dirt roads. But back here, nothing.

He stayed close to the clay-hard, stonelike building and moved swiftly around its nearest corner. He was heading along one wall of the house for a look into the street. Bolan had let the sounds of the troops guide him. He judged the majority, or possibly all, of the surviving troops to be in a vicinity not far from this house.

When Bolan reached the corner of the hut that gave onto the narrow mud, street, he eyeballed the scene at the center of the village where two rutted roads intercepted. His night vision was attuned to the darkness. He was able to make a clean head count of the uniformed men who crowded around an unmarked desert vehicle that matched the truck already destroyed.

Five soldiers stood around the vehicle. The Africans were heatedly debating among themselves in their own tongue.

The Executioner did not hesitate. He stepped clear of the wall. He remained in shadow. "Live free or die," he called out to toll their fate. He triggered a chattering blast from the Largo-Star.

The debate stopped and the soldiers went diving in all directions. Four of them moved under their own power, two dodging behind the truck, one making for the nearest building doorway, the other hitting the ground with rifle blazing in response to Bolan's fire.

The fifth guard did a brief crazy dance as a stream of screaming slugs stitched him from right to left like the heavy metal scythe of Time itself.

Bolan bent his knees into a low, low crouch and moved to the right. He heard bullets whisper near his ear; heard the ricochets of lead whine off the baked mud wall behind him.

Bolan triggered another short burst from the chopper in his hands. Geysers of dirt erupted in a line across the ground from right to left. Then geysers of blood spurted up as the line of bullets skewered the running target's life and set it up to roast in hell.

This was a major engagement.

The other running man was almost making the safety of the nearest building when another stutter of the machine gun checked the run into a sideways kick. Another hit in a festival of death lapping up losers in the flaming game of mankind's survival.

Bolan slapped a fresh clip into the weapon. He advanced toward the truck, remaining all the time in the shadows along the walls of the village huts.

There remained but two troopers in retreat behind the personnel carrier parked at the intersection. They both leaned out from opposite ends of the truck and fired simultaneous rounds down the length of the street. They had no idea where Bolan was. He continued advancing.

He was some seventy paces from a point where he estimated he would have a clear shot at both men — when a loud report sounded from the opposite side of the intersection.

A Galil, Bolan knew.

He saw the soldier on the far end of the truck tumble out into unprotected view. The soldier did not need protection now. Most of his back was blown out from an exit wound.

The other soldier ducked out to seek new cover in front of the vehicle.

When the merc terrorist was in his sights, the Executioner offered him his worth, a shower of hot lead and a free ticket to hell.

Then the merc, Hohlstrom, emerged from the front door of Fahima's and Bushir's inn. Hohlstrom held his Galil assault rifle at port arms. Bolan saw that the other man appeared every bit as aware of the danger around them as did Bolan himself.

Bolan approached the Swede. The two men were alone in the darkness.

"That's one I owe you, man," said Bolan.

The burly merc gave an easy shrug.

"Forget it. We need to have a few words in private, Colonel."

Bolan felt a spinal shiver.

"You must have me confused with someone else."

"I don't think I do, Colonel Phoenix."

Bolan's fists wrapped tighter around the Galil. He could see that Hohlstrom did not miss the response.

Hohlstrom's free hand was on his holstered side arm.

"Explain, guy."

"Steady," said the Swede. "I know who you are and why you're here. And you don't stand a chance in hell of living another thirty minutes."

The tableau held for taut seconds between Mack Bolan and Hohlstrom, the Swedish merc. The two men stood there eyeballing each other in the shadows of Bishabia.

The Huey choppers in the nearby villa were scheduled to take off within five minutes. They were Mack Bolan's last chance to reach Eve.

Hohlstrom knew Bolan's true identity. He knew that Bolan was not Rideout, professional merc.

"You're the Israeli agent," said Bolan. "Let's have it one piece at a time while we're moving." The muzzle of his rifle hovered menacingly as they entered the inn. Hohlstrom kept pace as the two men moved quickly toward the storage room where Bolan had found Fahima and Bushir — and the secret tunnel. "How much do you know about me?"

"I know that you are Colonel Phoenix and that you head an operation code named Stony Man," replied Hohlstrom. "You must be here for the same reason as I."

"Tell me the reason."

"You're here to stop Jericho. We can work together."

"I don't think so. You'll have to delay your mission. There's another angle I'm working."

They entered the tunnel, but not before Bolan set down the Largo-Star. It would be real hard explaining that away. He was counting on his and Hohlstrom's arrival to come so close to the lift off that Kennedy's subordinate, Doyle, would have no time for questions or explanations.

Hohlstrom evidently knew the way into the tunnel from his own intel probes.

"My mission is to destroy the shipment in the lead chopper, whatever it is," said Hohlstrom.

"Then it's a suicide mission."

They were jogging now, single file through the tunnel, Bolan leading the way.

"I'm going to blow that copter to hell, one way or another," insisted Hohlstrom. "The cargo is a product of your government's Nuclear Chemical and Biological program. It cannot be allowed to fall into Arab possession. Libya and terrorism sleep together, you know that." The guy's voice grew especially hard. "There must be no more holocausts in this generation. It cannot be allowed to happen."

Bolan tried a new tack. His last one before having to nullify this harmful ally.

"Hohlstrom, listen. The angle I'm working... we've got an agent in the middle of this. But Jericho knows. He has the woman."

"Woman?"

"A lady named Eve Aguilar. She's a good human being, Hohlstrom." Bolan could see the guy turning it over. He pressed on. "I cannot leave her inside to die. I've got air backup behind me. We may be able to pull that cargo out intact or destroy it and stop any deal between Jericho and Shahkhia, and rescue the woman as well. This doesn't have to be a suicide job for you."

A moment's hesitation from the merc.

Time had slipped away altogether. Hohlstrom could not be allowed to stand in Bolan's way.

They had Eve.

Hohlstrom hesitated, finally nodded.

"Okay, Phoenix. If they've got the woman, we'll get her out safely. If the thing breaks wrong... then we do it my way."

"You
try
to do it your way," corrected Bolan. "Me, I'll play it as it comes."

They reached the bottom of the stairs leading up to Kennedy's office. Hohlstrom came forward to Bolan's side.

"All right, guy. For now... you call it."

"Your people don't have any idea where we're headed?"

"None. That's why I've waited this long. I want to tear their whole thing down."

"Then we'll tear it down together," said the Executioner.

The conversation had taken less than two minutes.

The men moved up the stairway to the sliding panel into what had been Kennedy's office.

As the iciness of ascending combat-readiness flowed through him, Mack Bolan reflected on the allies with whom this mission had brought him into contact.

Fahima and Bushir. Lansdale. And now Hohlstrom.

And maybe Death.

Death was an ally when it kissed the other side.

On this mission, Death had been no ally at all. Thatcher had known of approaching death and sold out to get money for his family. Fahima had lost her father. Death was all around.

Mack Bolan had to find Eve Aguilar before she too was kissed by the Reaper.

He would tear down the walls of Jericho's world, whatever the man was hiding, to spare her from a bloody end.

That was Bolan's Something Big.

Jericho's Something Big was a nuisance factor he would eliminate en route to his supergoal.

The Executioner was on a collision course with a whole bunch of shit that stood in his way, and he would blast open a path for himself every inch of that way.

A path of rescue from distress — a high path, blazed by sacred fires.