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.
13
Bolan abandoned the Syrian jeep well before he reached the city. Twice on foot he dodged military patrols — one Syrian, the other Druse — and it was only because of the ever shifting lines that he was able to move at all.
At a farmhouse he offered a Muslim family more Lebanese pounds than they probably saw in a year for the rusty Saab that had only one fender and no lights. They were glad to take the money and Bolan took the car, continuing on into Beirut.
The address Zoraya had given Katz was in Hay alSalloum, an area generally under the control of the Shiite militia group called Amal.
Centuries of punishing white sun and winds had razored across the neighborhood like the breath of Hades. The area, which had also fallen victim to war, was not very different from the section where Zoraya lived near the Avenue des Frangais, except that Hay alSalloum appeared to be a more commercial district. But it was every bit as closed up and deserted as that corner of the hellground where Bolan had last met Zoraya.
Today's shelling of the city had begun when Bolan got within two blocks of the place his map of Beirut indicated he would find Zoraya and perhaps the child, Selim.
Thoughts of the woman and boy left Bolan's mind when the bombardment from Druse artillery in the mountains resumed, aimed at the Christian sectors of the city and government positions. Yet Bolan knew war well enough to realize the shelling would be taken as a signal by all troops and gunmen in the city that the war was on for another day. The brief respite of the morning was over. The killing could resume.
Bolan parked his car and continued warily on foot, his combat blacksuit, Beretta and Big Thunder again making him appear no more out of place than he had during the hours of darkness.
The streets and avenues streamed with pedestrians, civilians, toting luggage and children, hurrying to be gone.
Bolan passed them going in the opposite direction when he heard moans and tortured pleas for help from an alley.
He paused and glanced in to see two Shiite militiamen tormenting one of their own, a veiled Muslim woman.
One of the soldiers laughed and cruelly squeezed and twisted the hapless woman's breasts through her clothes. The other Shiite forgot his grenade launcher for a moment and fumbled to unbutton the fly on his uniform with one hand. With the other he reached to pull off the woman's veil.
Bolan barely stopped. Big Thunder roared twice and two would-be rapists were deposited headless amid the bombed-out rubble.
He continued on. The woman hurried away.
The address Katz had passed on to him as the rendezvous point with Zoraya turned out to be an auto-repair garage, the metal doors closed.
Bolan tried the handle of a door set into the business front alongside the garage opening, and this portal opened inward.
The street was full of civilians, not soldiers. The gunmen of the different factions engaged one another blocks away, the sounds of the shooting muted by rows of bombed-out buildings and others like the garage that had somehow remained untouched thus far.
Bolan soundlessly closed the door behind him with his heel. Icy eyes and a cold Beretta fanned the gloom. He discerned rusted-out hulks of cars on blocks, stripped of parts over the years.