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  She beamed at him and then pointed at another hangar.

  "Why are all the soldiers standing around that building? What's so valuable in there, our president?"

  The general laughed. "Much more valuable than any politician. Yes, far more precious. In there may be the weapon that wins the war for us against Israel. We may never have to worry about the Jewish state again!"

  "It's never bothered me much. Except when the war takes you away. It's going to be soon, I'll bet."

  He laughed and shook his head. "I can't even tell you that. Now I will send you home in a taxi. I have much work to get done before tomorrow morning. On your way." He turned and walked away without a backward glance at her. She almost stuck her tongue out at him, but knew others were watching.

  Quickly she caught a taxi and got out near her apartment. By the time she unlocked the door, it was almost two in the afternoon.

  "It's all right, I live here," Luana said when she unlocked the door. "Don't shoot."

  "I'm not going to shoot," Bolan said from a chair in the big room.

  "You are supposed to stay in bed."

  "Doctor said I could move around a little, that it might help get rid of the toxin in my bloodstream. He gave me three shots with his biggest square needle."

  "That was the job I wanted," she teased him. She watched him a moment more. He was recovering quickly, but he would not be ready by morning. No! He had to be ready. She told him about the tests she had witnessed.

  Bolan tried to get up. He slumped back in the chair.

  "Tonight I will help you walk. You need to rest, to sleep. I'll help get you back to bed."

  Bolan nodded. He had to be ready by morning. Early morning, when Mossad would make the attack. He had to be fit to fight by 2:00 A.M.! Just twelve hours away!

  As he lay in her bed, Bolan heard Luana on the phone. Afterward she appeared at the door with her small hat on.

  "A final meeting. Some times, coordination. Can't risk it on the phone. I'll be gone no more than an hour. You rest." She bent close and watched his eyes and brushed her lips over his cheek. "Go to sleep. After this is all over I'll take a leave and show you a nice, peaceful little place down by Jaffa. There are no crowds and the water is warm."

  "Deal," he said.

  She went out and he watched where she had been. Luana was becoming more than just a nurse and a friend. Bolan shook his head. He didn't need that kind of complication. Women he cared for always died. He turned his head the other way and closed his eyes.

  His mission, his calling, his duty. He had to remember them. They were primary.

  Bolan remembered the days when he was working closely with the U.S. government and Stony Man Farm. The team operation had given him the first real friends he had had in years, but it also brought complications.

  Now he was strictly on his own, waging the war the way he knew it must be fought.

  Now he functioned outside the law. That had never bothered him. Despite many scrapes with lawmen in many nations, he had never once fired a shot or taken offensive action against a lawful policeman or detective in any country. He never would.

  In his personal journal Bolan had once written: "I am not above the law. In the final analysis, justice under the law is the only sure hope for mankind. But sometimes a man just can't do it by the book. Sometimes the law's own principles are in conflict with its highest ideals."

  The Executioner had always said that the world was a jungle, where the first law had always been and always would be self-survival. He now knew that his decision to carry on the fight alone came from this basic jungle law. He was an excellent jungle fighter in every meaning of the word. He was a man who could take care of himself and wipe out his enemies at the same time. His skill came from long years of practice and the high development of his survival and combat instincts. He was what commanders called a "natural" fighter, using instinctively what other men had to develop slowly.

  He knew his one-man war had changed him. He was not as trusting as the average man. Anyone at any time might be an enemy. He had thousands of them going all the way back to the Mafia; now added to the list were the intelligence agencies of the world and a Russian general. It simply was not practical for him to trust implicitly every man or woman he met. He took that second and third look at every offered hand of friendship, every gesture of kindness, looking for the bomb, the booby trap, the death-dealing double cross.

  Sometimes he felt like a jungle panther on a tree limb, his long tail flicking in nervous agitation, making up his mind whether to leap off and make the kill.

  Often in the night he stared at the darkness and wondered how much one man could accomplish. Always he had to harden his gut, freeze his human instincts and be ready and willing to wade knee-deep through enemy blood. He had the talent, the tools, the intelligence. All he had to do was apply them right up past the red danger line of survival and he could accomplish a great deal.

  He did not battle the KGB for fame or fortune or glory. He wanted no newspaper headlines, TV interviews, no movies made of his life.

  He demanded only a taste of justice.

  Bolan sighed and tried to sit up straighter in the chair in the small apartment in the middle of Damascus, Syria. He would have his body functioning in six hours. He must! He had a call to duty! By 2:00 a.m. tomorrow he must be in fighting trim, even if he had to fool his body to do so.

  He would draw from his knowledge of the fakir and from the early American Indian Dog Soldier, both of whom knew how to use the mind to overcome physical disabilities or injury. The mind can force the body to function even though it is ill or hurt. The mind can block out pain — for a while. Then, when the surging emotion and mind power finished the mission, the pain would slam back tenfold. But then the body would have the time to rest and heal completely.

  Bolan thought of the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, and drew from their understanding and their strength. When the call for action came, his mind would have his body ready.

  18

  Soft humming from the kitchen penetrated into the bedroom where Bolan lay, bringing him gently out of his slumber. He had slept deep. It was just before six in the evening. Slowly he sat up.

  He looked around. His eyes were working normally. He felt less fevered. Bolan wore only his shorts. He pushed his feet toward the side of the bed and made it. His feet touched the floor and for a moment the room tilted, then came steady.

  "Spy lady," Bolan called.

  She was in the room at once, eyes bright.

  "You should get into your pants." She picked them up from a chair and handed them to him.

  It took two minutes to get his pants on. Then she gave him his shirt. That was easier.

  Luana helped a little as he walked slowly, carefully, to the small kitchen and sank into a chair. He was applying all his mind control, fighting back the nausea. Only a desperate effort kept him moving to the chair. Before he sat down he paused. Control, dammit! He would have to think through each movement for a while.

  "How did the final briefing go?" he asked her.

  "Smooth. Too smooth, that worries me. I'll fill you in after dinner. We make our first hit on the airport at 4:00 a.m."

  "I'll be ready."

  She looked at him as she turned the steak. "Mack, how can you be ready? You can barely stand up. I won't allow you to be in that much danger if you're not up to it. It would be a waste."

  "By tomorrow morning I'll be running a hundred-yard dash in 10.5. Want to race me?"

  "First we walk…"

  "I'll be walking half the night, and running. I've got a few mystical tricks your fakirs might envy."

  "Such as?"

  "You've heard of men in combat who get so hyped up that they can be wounded and never realize it? One man led the charge and won the battle, not even knowing that his right arm was gone."

  "Yes, I've heard."

  "Mind over matter. I can shut out pain for several hours, isolate it, ignore it. I'll be ready."

  He
consumed the steak and three cups of coffee.

  "You must be getting better," she said.

  "Do you have a diagram of the airfield? Strong points, targets? Do we know if the gas is still in hangar twelve?"

  "Our strategy is all worked out. We will have more than sixty men in the operation. Our latest information is that the canisters have been transferred to one big truck and are under heavy guard in a special area. Just before flight time the truck will drive to each of the four jets and they will load the canisters."

  "We know where the truck is?"

  "Yes. At the far end of the field between earth shields."

  "Timing?" Bolan asked.

  "Load-up time is set to begin at 0430 hours. Our strike is set for 0355 hours, while the truck is still at the far end of the field."

  "I'm going after the truck. Who is on that detail?"

  "Me and nineteen others. We'll all be armed with automatic rifles and four grenades each."

  "Good. You're ready. Thorough, detailed, brilliant Israeli planning as usual. Let's go for a walk."

  "A walk! You can hardly stand up."

  "Around the apartment, until it gets dark, then up and down the stairs a dozen times and a two-mile hike down the street and back."

  "You'll never make it."

  "I will. We will. Then back here and another steak, not quite so well done as the last one. Then a four-mile jaunt. By morning I have to be in fighting trim."

  On the first trip around the living room, Bolan was tortoiselike. He growled as he walked, first leaning on Luana, then fighting down the empty chalkiness in his gut and his backbone that seemingly had turned into jelly. He ordered his body to perform, to move, to function normally, and gradually it responded. One after another part of his body was willed into action, and soon he could walk naturally.

  "Let's try the stairs," he said. Again it was a battle as the up and down movement of his legs and the strain on his lower back left bile in his throat. He fought against failure, forced his body to respond, forced his mind to direct uncooperating muscle groups to function.

  They went up and down ten times, then he rested, leaning against the wall. He was glad it was dark so no one could see him.

  The first block down the street went slowly. Little by little he psyched himself up into moving faster, with longer strides. It was the longest two miles of his life.

  The second steak was barely warm, and he tore it apart with a steak knife and his teeth. He ate the blood-red meat like a starved man and had two more cups of coffee.

  His second march down the dark streets was faster. Luana had to hurry to keep up. By the time they got home he was tired but satisfied. She gave him one more shot of the penicillin the doctor had left in the refrigerator.

  "I'll sleep again, and get up at 2:00 A.M.," he told her. "Set your own alarm clock, I won't need one." He gave her a snappy salute and went into the living room and lay down on the couch.

  Luana stared at him in wonder, then went to the bedroom and stretched out on the bed in her clothes. She would not undress. In the army you never undressed when on the frontier and on duty. It just was never done. She slept.

  * * *

  It was still dark as four Israeli operatives left a car near the south end of the Atsi air base near Damascus and ran quietly and unseen to a building fifty yards from the edge of the large airfield. Each man had a Russian-made, shoulder-mounted rocket launcher and five rounds. The eighteen-inch rockets were marked HE for high explosive. Two men scurried around the building, through the alley and up on the other side so they could spread their attack.

  Precisely at 0355 hours one man shouldered his weapon, made sure it was loaded properly and sighted it on a military truck sitting just across the fence less than a hundred yards away. He fired. The rocket hit the cab of the truck and detonated, engulfing the rig in instantaneous fire as the fuel tank burst and added to the spreading flames.

  The soldier moved six feet to one side and the second man at the corner sighted a Syrian jet fighter, three hundred yards down the runway, going through a check preparatory to a night flight. The second rocket sheared off the jet fighter's left wing, and the wing fuel tank blossomed into a roaring hell.

  Four more rockets were fired in brisk, military manner, turning two more fighters, one truck and the landing light control station at the end of the runway into charred, flaming ruins. One round punched into the chain link and combat barbed wire at the edge of the airport, blasting a tank wide hole through it.

  With long-practiced perfection, the four gunners launched the rest of their rounds, pulverizing the end of the runway, targeting everything they could find on that part of the field until they had only one rocket left. The main diversion had been launched.

  Sirens whined, combat troops advanced from the north toward the sudden explosions at the south perimeter, moving cautiously as the last rounds hit, then rushing to the hole in the fence and charging through. Just as fifteen Syrian army men were crowding through the gap, the last Israeli in the team used his final round and blew the soldiers straight into the hands of Allah.

  At precisely 0350 at the main gate of the big air base, a pickup truck stalled. The driver got out and kicked the fender, talked to the sergeant and private on duty at the gate and said he would be right back with jumper cables. The two men volunteered to push the light pickup out of the lane of traffic that was backing up as early arrivals started coming to the base.

  When the driver was two hundred yards from his truck, he took a small red box from his pocket, snapped a switch and looked at his wristwatch. When the minute hand showed the time was exactly 0355, he pushed the red button.

  A hundred pounds of plastic explosive in the pickup detonated, shattering the gate, vaporizing the two soldiers pushing the rig and setting on fire twelve cars and trucks in the waiting line.

  More sirens wailed.

  Far across the airport near the officers' quarters, a pickup pulled to a stop outside the high fence. One man jerked a tarp off a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted in the truck box. A second man jumped in to guide the ammunition belt. The second the gunner heard the rockets exploding at the south end of the air base, he raked the barracks and any moving thing with fifty-caliber machine-gun fire.

  Four men pushed their heads out the barracks windows. Three of them became statistics as the heavy rounds thundered into their bodies, slamming them back into their rooms. Six men rushed from the near door in skivvies and white T-shirts, making them perfect targets in the glow of the porch light.

  All six danced as the fifty-caliber lead messengers punched them into Allah's palace.

  A military-police jeep careered around a corner toward the sound. The Israeli gunner shattered the windshield, decapitated the driver and killed the passenger, then riddled the crashed jeep. It burst into fire from spilled gasoline.

  The fifty-caliber machine gun chattered out death for seven minutes until the three boxes of ammunition were gone, then the driver powered away. His crew had not taken a single round of return fire.

  At the north side of the field, near the area's massive ammunition-dump bunkers, Bolan, Luana and twenty heavily armed Israeli commandos hovered in a drainage ditch outside the fence. Two sappers had wired the fence and were ready to blow a gaping hole in it on signal. The bunkers were thirty feet wide and a hundred feet long, covered with ten feet of packed earth.

  Their watches showed 0355 hours. Then the rockets exploded to the south, and a moment later they heard machine-gun fire.

  The chain link fence in front of them erupted in flame and smoke as a jolting shock preceded the sound of the explosion. The fence had an opening six feet wide and the commandos bolted through it in combat order, advancing toward the center of the mounds, where the truck holding the canisters was supposed to be parked.

  Rifle fire snarled in front of them. The troops hit the dirt. The commander, a captain, sent four men around the closest mound and put a light machinegun team on top of it.


  Bolan ran up the slope with the machine gunners. They had a small bipod-mounted machine gun that fired 7.62mm slugs and could chatter away all day with just one man handling it. The second man carried belted ammunition. Bolan knew the gun could kick out over five hundred rounds a minute.

  On top of that mound they had a clear view of the next three and could more easily spot defenders. Quietly they set up with the gunner prone behind the weapon. They killed three Syrians in ten seconds. Near one mound they could see the top of the tractor trailer that contained the gas cylinders.

  They covered the advance of the main body, then leapfrogged ahead. Newly dug trenches surrounded the big truck. Spaced, defensive fire came from the trenches. An Israeli soldier beside Bolan took a round through the throat and fell, bleeding to death. Three more Israeli attackers were cut down when a machine gun opened up from under the truck.

  Luana had been on the other side of Bolan, firing to keep down the gunners in the trenches as their men moved ahead. Now she passed Bolan two grenades.

  "Roll them into the trenches," she said.

  Bolan pulled a pin on the first one and threw it overhand toward the holes a hundred feet ahead of them. The smooth bomb hit on the dirt, rolled to the left, then straight ahead and vanished into the trench. There was an agonized scream just as the bomb detonated. Bolan threw the second grenade, another hit, then used his AK-47 to riddle the front tire on the big tractor. As the thirty slugs slammed into the tire, it hissed and the rest of the air gushed out as the front of the heavy-duty tractor sagged to one side.

  Bolan heard a new surge of firing. It came from what sounded like a company of infantry troops to the south. A few small knee mortar rounds began falling near the Israelis.

  The Executioner crawled on hands and knees to the next ammo bunker mound where he saw Luana. She was dressed in camouflaged fatigues as were the rest of the attackers, and her AK-47 was hot from firing.

  "Do we have any radio?" Bolan asked her.