Thoughts came to him of Eve Aguilar, a woman he cared for, who had fallen captive to his enemies during the Executioner's bustup of the Libya Connection when he had been John Phoenix.
He had come to rescue Eve.
And had not reached her in time.
The bastards had skinned her alive.
After a nod from a Syrian officer, Fouad Zakir stalked directly up the stairway to the second level, again with Bolan slightly behind him, toting the AK-47 over his shoulder by its strap in approved bodyguard style.
At the foot of the stairs Bolan noticed the stairwell continued down to the basement.
The corridor upstairs seemed crowded with soldiers armed with rifles that matched Bolan's, the uniforms and armbands running the full gamut of the Lebanese terrorist coalition.
They were all here: the PLO, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Amal... and now the Druse militia in the person of Fouad Zakir, who barely glanced at the corridor full of bodyguards.
The Arab terrorist crossed to the nearest door, grunted some guttural order at Bolan with a motion that indicated he should remain out there.
Then Zakir stepped inside and no one tried to stop him.
The meeting is already under way, Bolan deduced.
Strakhov would be in there now with the whole rotten bunch.
But first... Zoraya.
The men in the hallway barely glanced at the soldier who had accompanied Zakir as far as the door of the briefing room.
Bolan figured the various faction leaders would suggest facing each other across a table without being crowded by their bodyguards, yet the men in that room were not fools. At the first sound of trouble from within the summit meeting, that door would be burst inward under the power of these bodyguards, who would fall into place behind their leaders.
Some of the men in the corridor stood in small clusters, smoking cigarettes conversing in subdued Arabic while more soldiers leaned idly against walls of the passageway. But every one of them had his assault rifle inches from fingertips and the low murmur of voices could not conceal the tension.
Bolan leaned against a vacant space of hallway wall and lit a cigarette.
By the time he flicked out the match, the others had lost interest in him, accepting the image he projected.
After a couple puffs on the butt, Bolan casually ambled a few feet to the nearest stairwell leading downstairs the same stairs he had used at dawn when his tracking of Strakhov and General Masudi brought him here. At that moment, Bolan gave the impression of the universal soldier in need of a latrine.
He rounded the corner from the others, and no one tried to stop him as he strolled down the stairs at the opposite end of the building from the Orderly Room. He touched the bottom landing and found what he remembered from his penetration of the place that morning; a side door leading out, flanked by a stairwell that led to the basement level.
Bolan continued down the stairs until he came around a turn into the well-lighted basement corridor. His brisk authoritative step only fooled the two Syrian soldiers at a desk long enough for them to see this was no officer of any of the factions upstairs but a mere Druse peasant who had somehow gotten lost.
They watched the "militiaman" approach as if he wanted to ask a question.
Then lightning-fast chops descended toward the unsuspecting troopers' necks. Both men died without a sound before they had even risen from their chairs. They sat back down with broken necks.
The absence of any other soldiers posted there told Bolan what to expect and he found it.
Nothing.
He raced from door to door of the basement, stopping to pick two of the four locks, but each room was unoccupied.
No Zoraya.
Bolan did not know whether to be encouraged or depressed, so he just kept looking, hustling back up those same stairs before anyone from above found the two dead men. That would happen before long, he knew, but so would the Israeli air strike. All that mattered now was getting to the office annex across from HQ, then hitting that meeting upstairs.
He came up the stairs and out of the building from the wing opposite the Orderly Room.
The atmosphere on the main floor hummed with activity, orderlies moving in and out of offices, Syrian field officers elbowing their way through clerks to deliver and receive vital intel on the heavy righting that could be heard like distant thunder echoing through the valleys of the Shouf.
No one paid attention to the blue-eyed "Druse" who topped those stairs and briskly left the building, walking toward the HQ annex that had all the signs of having been cleared.
Bolan had to find out what that meant.
He burst through a side entrance of the squat annex structure and knew instantly that he had stepped into the trap he'd been striving to avoid since this mission began.
The annex had been cleared, sure, and there could have been more than one reason but the main reason had to be: Bolan.
Every exit out of the hallway Bolan found himself in had been plugged up with at least two Syrian soldiers.
There were about eleven men in all and every one of them was pointing an AK-47 right at the man in Druse militia garb.
Bolan sensed movement behind and felt himself being covered from outside, too.
The only man in civilian attire in the scene also held a gun, a pistol, pointed like all the others at the figure in the doorway.
Major Kleb, GRU, wore a satisfied cat's grin that did not make it to cannibal-hungry eyes.
"And now, Mr. Mack Bolan," Kleb purred, "I think we have you exactly where we want you."
19
Strakhov tried to keep his attention on the petty bickering between the factions, but without success.
The KGB chief sat at one end of the oblong table.
The representatives from the Palestine Liberation Organization, newly reorganized under Soviet sponsorship, and a representative of the Shiite militia sat to his right.
To the KGB man's left were the ranking Syrian general of this sector and the liaison officer from another Iranian Revolutionary Guard contingent.
Fouad Zakir sat at the opposite end of the table from Strakhov. The Druse VIP wore an oily smile that said nothing.
The squabbling continued over a minor point that had temporarily slipped Strakhov's mind, he noted with annoyance.
His stubby fingers pinched up the lemon slice from the saucer of his teacup. He found the sour taste of the citrus fruit to be exquisite a relaxant of sorts that invariably allowed him the objectivity with which to appraise situations more accurately.
He sipped the tea but still could not get his mind back on whatever these accursed Arab desert rats thought to be so important they would die over their foolish religions.. and of course to bid for power over others, such as Strakhov possessed.
He could not follow the conversation even though they had been ordered to speak in English, that damnable all-purpose language even Strakhov had to employ on occasion, a common tongue they all understood.
He could not stop thinking about Mack Bolan.
The thought of killing Bolan always brought a peculiar druglike warmth over the usually coolheaded Strakhov. He had wanted Bolan dead for a long time now and had utilized all the resources of his KGB unit and others, all without success.
The desire for Bolan's head had consumed Strakhov since the American had gone on that mission to steal a new Russian helicopter from Afghanistan and had killed the test pilot of the prototype helicopter.
The pilot's name: Kyril Strakhov.
Beloved son of Greb.
Kyril's mother had died giving birth to the boy, and Kyril's death severed something inside Strakhov that he felt might have been his last tenuous fink to anything loving or kind or caring in this hostile world.