April leaned forward and touched Bolan's hand across the table. She spoke in that soft voice which could convey so much strength.
"You're doing the right thing," she assured him. "And you've been pushing so hard for so long. There's nothing you can do right now but wait for that phone on the wall to ring. Hal's men are doing everything they can. You should use this time to rest. You'll need your strength later."
She was right, of course, Bolan reflected. April Rose, along with Hal, was one of the few people whose judgment Bolan trusted implicitly. He made the decisions, sure. But he always listened to what April said.
Brognola struck a match and relit his ever present stogie. "Please don't you two start making moon eyes at each other," he begged in mock desperation, through a cloud of cigar smoke. "How about trying to figure out who killed the general's brother out there by the pool? There's a healthy pastime. Any ideas on that?"
Before Bolan could respond, April added to the question. "And how many bad guys are we dealing with here? Is the person who killed Dr. Nazarour the same person who planted the cyanide canisters in the gatehouse out front?"
"Yeah, they were the same person," said Bolan. "My guess is that Dr. Nazarour came across the guilty party out there by the swimming pool just as the person was triggering the radio signal to release the cyanide in the gatehouse. I don't know what the general's brother was doing out there. I had it figured that he'd be in his room, junked out on something. But somehow he ended up out there just before the fighting commenced, and somehow he got himself killed."
Brognola snorted. A sour sound. "Whatever happened to the old-time simple missions?" he asked rhetorically. "This damn thing has more angles than a..."
He was interrupted by the ringing of the kitchen wall phone. Bolan stood and grabbed it.
"Hello?"
"Colonel Phoenix? Thank God it's you. This is Carol Nazarour. I — I need you...." The voice came in a panicky, hushed whisper. She must have been praying that it was Bolan who would answer the phone in her beleaguered home.
"Where are you?" he asked.
"At a restaurant in Bannockburn Heights. Do you know where that is?"
Bolan knew. "Where are they taking you?"
"To a small airstrip in Bethesda."
"Bethesda? That's all residential or government property."
"There's supposed to be a very short airfield near the naval hospital," she told him. "They use it for STOLs — that's what Minera called them — whatever they are."
"Short Takeoff and Landing," said Bolan. "There's a field on Goldsboro that the hospital uses. Is there any way you can break away now?"
"No. I'm in the ladies' room. Rafsanjani is waiting for me outside the door. He doesn't know there's a phone in here. I was trying to escape on my own. I knew the tunnel was useless because Eshan would probably have someone guarding it. I was holding your gun and cutting off from the ground when Rafsanjani took me by surprise from behind. I never heard him. He moved like a cat! He took the gun and — oh, my God! No!..."
Bolan heard a flurry of motion on the line. The distinct sound of flesh being brutally slapped.
The line went dead.
Hal and April were both watching Bolan keenly as he hung up the phone and swung around.
"It was her, wasn't it?" said April.
Bolan nodded. "There's an airstrip in Bethesda. The general's on his way there to meet his flight. That's where the action is."
Brognola rose and started with Bolan toward the door. "Let me get some of the boys together and we'll..."
Bolan stopped him with a slight touch on the arm. "No, Hal. I've got to do this alone."
"Alone?" Brognola obviously had not expected this from Bolan, but he fielded it smoothly. "No way, buddy. Yazid and what's left of his Iranian attack force could show up at that airstrip. You've done more than your share already, Striker. You've got to let me back you up on this one."
But Bolan was adamant.
"Hal, that lady's life is my chief priority at this point," he told the fed. "Don't worry, I'm not forgetting Yazid and his bunch. Maybe they're onto the general, maybe they're not. But either way, I am going to get Mrs. Nazarour safely out of that situation she's in.
"If Yazid and his sidekick Pouyan are there and I show up with a cadre of federal marshals and the shooting starts — well, the idea is to get the woman safely away from there, not get her killed in action."
April spoke from where she sat at the table. "He's right, Hal. We have to let him do it his way."
Brognola snorted with mock gruffness. "Don't we always. Okay, Striker. We'll fall in as backup a mile to your rear. I trust that will be giving you enough room to swing?"
"That'll give me plenty of room," said Bolan grimly. "Thanks for understanding, Hal. Okay, let's roll."
He lifted a clenched fist as a final silent "Stay hard" to these fellow warriors on the team.
Then he was off and moving into the night again.
For one more confrontation possibly with two separate enemies.
He was pushing himself to the max and he knew it.
But there was no way he could shrug off his responsibility to Carol Nazarour.
No way at all.
Bolan knew in his gut that the coming confrontation would be fast, bloody, and decisive. And it was less than thirty minutes away.
No more sitting by the phone.
The game was again in play.
15
Karim Yazid was slowly coming out of his state of shock. The slaughter of his men on the grounds of the estate in Potomac had left him stunned and responding purely at an instinctual level.
The Iranian hit-squad leader vaguely remembered fleeing that scene with Amir. There had been staunch resistance inside the house from the guards protecting the general. The guards had fallen, along with one of Karim and Amir's squad. Then Minera, whom Yazid had once met through Rafsanjani, had arrived in the house. The security chief had been a mighty fighter, and somehow he had spirited the general and his party away.
But the ferocity of Minera had been nothing compared to the level of resistance encountered by the three squads of Karim's men who had attacked the front of the house.
The scene of dismembered bodies where the claymore had been detonated had sickened both Karim and Amir. From that point on, Karim's memory became hazy. He remembered running silently with Amir toward the front gate. He remembered, as if it were a dream, passing the bodies of his men, which lay stretched across the property of that estate.
These images somehow became interspersed in his mind with images of that climactic day of the '79 revolution, when these same fourteen men of his squad had stormed the Lavizan barracks in northeastern Tehran. It had been their finest moment, as these tough commandos had outmaneuvered and slain scores of the Shah's crack Javidan guards in one bloody sweep through their fortress compound. Now, on an estate in Maryland, these men had gone to Allah. They had died with weapons in their hands. Martyrs to the cause of Islam.
And Karim Yazid was left without a team. At first he could not believe what he had heard from the lone survivor of the front assault squads — a badly wounded man whom Karim and Amir had carried between them on the final leg of their trek out through the front gates of the estate, to where one of their vans had been parked nearby.