Flight 741 Read online

"Afraid you've lost me there," McCarter said.

  "We think your buddy in Durango was the Raven — or, to be precise, a Raven."

  "What the hell?"

  "I know enough to trust my senses," Katzenelenbogen said. "We recognized the Raven and his playmates in Mittenwald. I know his face, and there was no mistake."

  "We don't believe there was," the big fed said.

  "Well, bloody hell."

  "A double?" Lyons asked.

  Brognola spread his hands. "Why not? It worked for Hitler, Churchill, Castro — and we still hear rumors on a certain president. It wouldn't be the first time that a famous face decided to diversify."

  "And I took out the ringer in Durango?"

  "If we're right, it looks that way."

  "Well, shit."

  "Don't sweat it. If you hadn't dropped him, half our people would be chasing shadows now."

  The French Israeli agent couldn't quite suppress a smile. "So Mittenwald was number one."

  Brognola shrugged. "Assuming there are only two."

  Katz stiffened. "What are you suggesting, Hal?"

  Brognola spent a moment looking at the unlit cigar in his hand, rolling it between his thumb and index finger.

  "We've been curious about the little shit's mobility, you know that, Katz. A double-header in Beirut on Monday, bombs in Paris on a Wednesday, Nicaragua by the weekend. Granted, he could cover it by air, but we've been watching for the bastard like he has the fucking plague. There was a lapse while he was out of sight and semi-out of mind — but since Flight 741, I'll bet my pension that he's grounded somewhere in the Middle East, afraid to show his face."

  "He showed it in Durango yesterday," Lyons said.

  "That wasn't any hologram we saw in Mittenwald," McCarter seconded.

  "Which proves my point. Mobility has always been his strength, his trademark. Take away his combat stretch, and he's a sitting duck."

  Katz scowled. "You think we saw a double, too?"

  "A triple, maybe. Who's to say? We tipped GSG-9, and they had people down in Mittenwald by lunchtime. Found the guy's room, in fact. He called himself Kurt Mueller on the register."

  "And?"

  "And nothing, gentlemen. The room was clean. No traces of saliva, semen, nothing. And no fingerprints."

  "Okay. He wiped it down."

  "Or else he had no prints to leave," Lyons offered.

  "I'll grant you that we're speculating, Carl, but at the moment this is all we've got."

  "Not quite." The former LAPD sergeant's eyes were flashing now. "We know those bastards in Durango had a tight connection stateside, handling their distribution."

  "Gerry Axelrod." Brognola nodded curtly.

  "'Kay. So yank the DEA men off his case and let me have a crack. I'll shake the scumbag till he rattles when he walks."

  "We're way ahead of you on that. He's in Toronto. Caught the red-eye from Atlanta late last night."

  "Assessment?"

  "Justice doesn't think he's running. There's a possibility he knows about Durango, but we're betting that he's on another deal."

  "I'll check it out."

  Brognola swiveled in his chair to face the men of Phoenix Force. "What's happening at Steyr?"

  Katz frowned. "We're getting close. Your information was correct about the leak. They're losing pistols, submachine guns, but no one wants to talk about it."

  "That's confirmed," Brognola said. "Their SMGs are turning up in Baader-Meinhof hands, among the Red Brigades... we've even got a rumble on a shipment to the IRA. Your business from the Wolf Pack had a couple in their closet stash."

  McCarter grinned. "They never got that far."

  "We need to get a man inside," Brognola said.

  "I'm working on it," Katz replied. "I've got a friend in personnel."

  "Yeah? What's she look like?" Lyons cracked.

  And he could almost swear the French Israeli blushed, beneath his weathered tan.

  "She has the necessary assets."

  Hal Brognola didn't join the laughter.

  "I'd be happier if we could bring the others in," he said at last.

  "Don't worry, Hal. A simple in-and-out."

  "It's never just a simple in-and-out. You watch yourself."

  "I always do."

  "The man's a flamin' egomaniac," McCarter offered, smiling.

  Brognola laughed this time, but he appeared distracted all the same.

  "I want this Raven," he declared, when they were silent once again. "And if there's more than one, I want them all."

  "Why now?" Carl Lyons asked. "I mean, the special effort. He's been running free for what — eight years?"

  "It's more like nine. And that's about nine years too long."

  "This Beirut business hit you hard."

  Brognola shook his head. "Not really. Not the way you mean it, anyway. The bastard's done a lot worse things before."

  He thought about the OPEC snatch, the Paris bombings, other skyjacks and assassinations where the Raven had been positively linked to more than fifty deaths. Except it wasn't positively anymore. And still, the carnage wasn't all of it.

  "I've got a roster of the passengers on 741," he said. "They've been debriefed in Frankfurt by the CIA and processed stateside. All except for one."

  "Let's have the other shoe," Carl Lyons said, suspicion in his voice.

  "We've got a missing passenger," Brognola told them. "He was flying coach, and there are verified reports that he was beaten by the terrorists. It seems one of the gunners tried to rape a stewardess, and Mr. Blanski intervened."

  Carl Lyons caught it first. "Did you say Blanski?"

  "First name Michael."

  "Jesus Christ."

  Now Katzenelenbogen saw the link. "How can this be?"

  Brognola shrugged again. "We never thought about it, really, but he has to travel somehow... just like everybody else."

  "His port of embarkation?"

  "Munich. And we've checked. A pair of Baader-Meinhof heavies bit the big one there two days before his flight was hijacked."

  "Hell, we were right next door."

  McCarter hadn't made the name, and he was getting angry at the double-talk.

  "Will someone kindly tell me what the hell is going on?"

  "It's Bolan," Katz informed his partner. "He was on Flight 741."

  "My God."

  "You called it."

  "He'll be looking for the Raven."

  "We believe so," Hal responded to the room at large.

  "He'll find the bastard, too."

  "But will he? And assuming that he does, which Raven will he find? How many Ravens will he find?"

  "How many of the bastards are there?" Lyons asked.

  "If I'm right about our Raven from the airline being grounded, then we're looking at a minimum of three."

  "And if there's three..."

  "There might be four."

  "Or five."

  "Goddamnit, there could be five hundred."

  "No." Brognola shook his head. "Beyond a half a dozen, give or take, you're looking at diminishing returns. I don't believe we've got an army on our hands."

  "Well, that's a great relief, at any rate," McCarter said sarcastically.

  "Mack will take the bastard," Lyons said, with less conviction than he would have liked.

  "I hope so."

  "What, you think he can't?"

  "I think he might be walking into something that he doesn't understand," Brognola answered from the heart. "He's looking for the Raven, not a flock."

  "So, maybe we can even up the odds," the Ironman said.

  "It's not our job," Hal Brognola returned.

  "The hell you say."

  "You've got your orders, Carl. Stick to them."

  "Sure, no sweat. But let's suppose I get a chance to do some Raven hunting while I'm at it. Hell, I couldn't let a chance like that slip by."

  "Agreed. But make damn sure your mission isn't compromised."

  "Who, me?"

&
nbsp; Brognola shook his head in weary resignation, knowing that he wasn't really in control. Not now. The leash had somehow slipped at mention of the Executioner, but Hal was not dismayed. The Able warrior and the men of Phoenix Force would do their jobs. They always did.

  He only hoped this job would not be their last.

  Chapter Fifteen

  He had not always been the Raven. During childhood he was simply Julio — or Ilich to his father, who preferred the middle name with all its revolutionary overtones — and he had played as children will, around the family's neighborhood in a Caracas suburb.

  There was little in those days to set the boy apart from other kids, although in retrospect his classmates would lay claim to recollections of a brutal nature, evidence of violence hidden somewhere just behind the smiling, boyish face. They would remember incidents, however trivial or ancient, that when taken altogether seemed to sketch the portrait of a rather different little boy.

  There were schoolyard fights that Julio invariably lost but never backed away from. Teachers had to break up the scuffles because the younger, smaller boy would keep on coming at his enemy, regardless of the beating he had taken, heedless of his injuries.

  The string of petty thefts at school, around the neighborhood, in which he was suspected — but never proved guilty — of cooperating with a local street gang, acting as their finger man.

  The kittens, doused in kerosene, that streaked like comets through the streets at dusk, while Julio would laugh and laugh.

  It was impossible at this late date, to sort out truth from fiction, fact from fantasy in these childhood reminiscences. And did it really matter, after all?

  Julio Ilich Ramirez was born in 1949, a year before Korea threatened reenactment of the recent global war. His father was a well-to-do physician in Caracas; his mother served her husband as his nurse until she started bearing sons, of whom Julio was the first. Despite his wealth, inherited and earned, Esteban Ramirez was an armchair revolutionary and a closet communist. With a passion for Russian history, his one regret in life was being born a Venezuelan.

  Fate had robbed him of his chance to march with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, to face the Cossack charge and rout the brutal Hun at Stalingrad. Afflicted with the curse of affluence, he could do little more than worship from afar and teach his sons a proper reverence for Soviet ideals. As the children arrived at two-year intervals, he named them Ilich, Vladimir and Lenin — each in honor of the hero who would rest forever in Moscow's Red Square.

  Perhaps because he was the oldest and the first to hear his father's message in those days before it had grown trite, young Julio would prove to be the only revolutionary son his parents ever raised. And even here, his ardor would be tempered by a certain pragmatism, colored by a darker "something else" that lay thinly veiled beneath the surface of his soul. It was entirely possible that by his teens, Julio had already weighed the usefulness of communist philosophy, the chic expediency of branding aberrant behavior as a revolutionary act.

  Julio was a fair but undistinguished student in his native schools, and during 1966 his father had decided that the boy would benefit from a proximity to European culture. He was flown to London in the spring, and spent the next three years in various academies, collecting mediocre grades and earning quite a reputation as a ladies' man. He seemed perfectly at home among the mods and rockers, more in tune with Lennon and McCartney than with Lenin and Marx, cultivating a taste for blondes and low-slung sports cars.

  But Julio did not ignore the call of revolution absolutely. In addition to the Beatles and the Stones, the flower generation and a trend toward chemical escape from everyday affairs, the late sixties were renowned for youthful protest. Civil rights. The war in Vietnam. Free speech on campus and "police brutality." The rights of women, homosexuals, transsexuals, asexuals. The downfall of imperialism — invariably translated as U.S. imperialism by the strident voices of the New Left.

  Ramirez dabbled in the London revolutionary scene, uncertain of himself at first, but gaining confidence as time went by. If angry blacks rejected his assistance in their demonstrations, there were enough angry whites to go around.

  Julio was pleased to find that revolutionary women shared their favors freely among the soldiers of the cause. The combination of his Hispanic heritage and Marxist name assured Ramirez of a willing partner any time the activists convened to hatch their plots.

  A sexual experience with Julio not only met minority requirements, but exposed his partner to a certain thrilling risk, as well. Increasingly, the rumors spread that Ilich liked to punch his girls around — and still they came, attracted by the danger that was missing from their flaccid demonstrations in the streets.

  Julio and his cronies of "the revolution" spent their idle hours picketing embassies or military bases, chanting simple-minded slogans while police stood by impassively, the bobbies stifling a yawn or two when TV cameras were diverted toward the crowd. As idle weeks turned into lazy months, the crowd began to disappear, and with it went the cameras. The revolution was in desperate need of something to draw attention from the media, and during 1968 Ramirez hit upon the perfect scheme.

  Abortive bids for independence by the Czechs had lately brought about a Soviet invasion to crush the strident voices and restore a puppet government at gunpoint. Julio suggested to his comrades that it might be "interesting"...and worth some airtime on the BBC — to stage a protest at the local Russian embassy. If nothing else, the move would set their tiny group apart from all the others that were battling for headline space. Aside from aging Jews, no other group had picketed the Soviets for many years.

  On May Day, Julio led his tiny troop of activists to face the Russian bear. Their ranks were supplemented by assorted Zionists, religionists, a scattering of old White Russian exiles come to thumb their noses at the grandsons of the Bolsheviks. The Metropolitan police were almost friendly for a change, surprised and pleased to see the Soviets receiving some of what they were notorious for dishing out.

  That is, until the incident.

  It had begun with chanting, the obligatory signs and clapping hands, the human chain obstructing sidewalks, spilling over into traffic lanes while officers endeavored to restrain the demonstrators. Embassy officials kept their blinds drawn, counting on the grim-faced guards outside to keep them safe from any harm... but the Soviet diplomats could not contain their surprise. A demonstration aimed at Mother Russia was incredible.

  But it was happening, and Julio was in his glory, heading up a protest demonstration for the first — and only— time. He postured for the cameras and shared his words of wisdom with assorted housewives who had taken breaks from domestic chores to watch the telly for a while. And he might have pulled it off without a hitch, except for trouble from the Zionists.

  The Jews had many grievances with the Soviets, and they had come prepared to raise some hell. Julio spotted the Semitic types in army-surplus coats, producing little jars of ink and paint from bulging pockets, and he realized that he was on the verge of losing it. Control. The public eye. Attention. Another man might easily have shrugged it off, but surrender of the spotlight to another rankled Julio.

  In a flash, he shouldered through the crowd, snatched paint grenades away from an astonished Zionist and hurled them toward the embassy. The paint was crimson — for the blood of Czechs and Jews — and TV cameras captured Ilich beaming as the bloody streamers etched their random pattern on the embassy's facade.

  He was arrested, and the word was relayed to his school. He was sent down, amused as much as wounded by the euphemism for expulsion.

  In London, Julio found another school — though not without some difficulty — and resumed his studies. In order of importance, he set out to study women, wine and the philosophy of revolution. He rarely attended scheduled classes, opting instead to immerse himself in Castro, Che Guevara, Trotsky, Chairman Mao. He came to see that certain people — the Czechs, for instance — needed guidance from a stronger, more intelligent autho
rity until they had the strength to rule themselves.

  And when he next stopped by the Russian embassy, he went with hat in hand, a letter of abject apology appended to his application for a visa that would let him study in the motherland of revolution.

  He was finally accepted in 1969 at Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University. The KGB was well aware of Julio's potential now, their psychological evaluations filed away for future reference. His studies were a motley bag of literature, philosophy and Russian "history," but he was being groomed for bigger, better things. Negotiations had commenced on his arrival in the Russian capital, and he was eager — even anxious — to oblige the KGB. They offered him adventure of a sort, potential profit, international publicity in time — and Julio could not refuse.

  In April 1970 an incident was engineered, resulting in his ouster from Patrice Lumumba University. Allegedly, he had seduced the daughters of distinguished citizens — including some professors at the university — and there was reason to suspect his revolutionary zeal. Upon his disappearance from the campus, classmates naturally assumed that he was bound for Caracas, but their guess was off by several thousand miles. In fact, Julio Ramirez had been cleared through KGB for immediate enrollment at a different sort of school in Jordan, where instructors from the PLO were busy cranking out a graduating class of future terrorists.

  And Julio was a natural. He loved the weapons and explosives, the instructions in surveillance, the work with codes and ciphers. Overweight upon arrival, Julio had slimmed down quickly in the desert heat, existing on the Spartan diet of the fedayeen and doing daily calisthenics, running obstacles and slithering beneath barbed wire with live rounds snapping overhead. He loved it all, and after graduation he anticipated striking hard and often at the bulwarks of the West... but it was not to be. Not yet.

  A terrorist of quality must have a cover, and the Soviets had plans for Julio Ramirez that did not include a string of futile, suicidal firefights. In the fall of 1970 he surfaced once again in London, making contact with his friends from school and offering his services as tutor in Spanish. The position, unofficial as it was, provided Ilich with a documented source of income and a measure of respectability — although the latter would be tarnished by his exploits in the bedroom. Julio accepted only female "students," switching off between a list of nubile youngsters who appreciated his panache, and several older women who could well afford his services. Regardless of their age, Ramirez spoke their language fluently. In fact, his playboy reputation pleased the KGB no end. It was a facet of his cover — primo Western decadence — that Moscow hadn't thought to improvise.