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  All afternoon and evening the warrior had been plagued by nagging apprehension, vague misgivings that he couldn't name. He wrote it off to combat jitters, a condition that afflicts the seasoned veteran along with green recruits. No matter that a soldier might have faced the enemy a dozen or a hundred times before. On each occasion that he took the firing line, there was a fleeting moment when he questioned his ability, the wisdom of his orders, enemy positions or the state of his equipment and support. The Executioner, on hold in Baalbek, questioned all these and more.

  He trusted his ability to do a job in combat, but mature self-confidence didn't make Bolan bulletproof. The most professional of soldiers died eventually — from an oversight, some marginal miscalculation, or the fact that they were simply out of time. If Bolan's number came around this time, security meant nothing.

  His mission, as a concept, was a sound one. He'd known the odds at the beginning, and refusal of the task had never been an option. Bolan's sense of duty forced him to accept, and made him grateful for the opportunity to strike another blow against the savages. If this should be the last time out, at least he had a chance to make it count for something.

  His enemies were numerous, and the warrior didn't have a solid fix on all of their positions yet. It scarcely mattered, since a single man could never take them all in the allotted time, but he'd still feel better when he knew precisely where they were. Each member of the pack eliminated would be one more predator removed from circulation, extra frosting on the cake.

  Equipment-wise, the warrior recognized his limitations. He couldn't conduct a war with the Beretta and its two spare magazines, but he could make a start and hope to pick up other arms along the way. As for support, he had Chamoun, the rebel troops, and Jack Grimaldi waiting to assist him when he gave the word. Assuming, always, that he had a chance to get the message through.

  A simple case of combat jitters, right. He smiled and cranked the window open, listening to Baalbek's night sounds as he killed the lights and lay down on the double bed. His thoughts flashed back to Mara, but he pushed her image out of frame and concentrated on tomorrow and his scheduled tour of the powder factory. With that location fixed, he'd be in position to inflict substantial damage on the Bekaa pipeline. Cripple it, perhaps, or even bring it down.

  But first it would be necessary to establish contact with Chamoun, coordinate the strike before his cover started smoldering around the edges. Once it flamed, there would be no time left, no other chance to save the play.

  Tomorrow? Possibly before the day was out?

  He focused on the dark abyss of sleep and hoped he wouldn't dream.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Amir Rashad awoke with the sensation that a furry animal had crawled inside his mouth to die. His breath was rancid, his throat was parched from too much alcohol the night before. He glanced around the tiny bedroom, fearful of awakening the pain that lurked behind his eyes, and found that the woman had departed.

  Pale morning stabbed through rips and moth holes in the ancient curtains, forcing him to squint against the light. It would be early yet, but he had no spare time to waste. His contact would have been alerted to expect the envelope first thing.

  The more important task came back to him, its urgency sufficient to disperse his mental haze. This morning he'd graduate from errand boy and spy to the position of a valued player on his master's team. There would be no more menial assignments, no more hiding in the shadows. Once he proved his worth, by turning over the American, he'd be clearly marked for better things.

  Unless he hung about the room all day and missed his contact.

  Groaning with the pain it cost him, he threw back the rumpled, musty sheets and dragged himself into an upright posture. Walls and furniture revolved around him for a moment, finally stabilizing. It required a major effort of will for him to stand, but once erect, he thought he might survive.

  There were showers down the hall. Rashad propelled himself along the corridor on wooden legs and stood beneath the tepid spray while life crept back into his body. Other tenants of the cheap hotel were starting to arrive when he departed, bundling his threadbare towels and dropping them inside a hamper by the door.

  There was no question of consuming breakfast. He couldn't have kept it down, and it was pointless to waste money on a meal that would inevitably wind up in the gutter. Suffering didn't destroy his business sense or blind him to his main objectives for the day.

  A cautious man, Rashad decided to cover all the bases and run the errand for Chamoun first thing. It wouldn't take much time, and if his expectations for the second lap weren't entirely realized, his cover with the rebels would be safe. Accordingly he took no steps to read the message, making certain that its seal of wax was still intact.

  His rebel contact was the owner of a humble pawnshop, several blocks away from the hotel where he'd passed the night. The shop was open early, its proprietor expecting him, and he approached the place like any other customer. He waited while the seal was broken and the message read. The old man glanced up when he was finished.

  "You have read this?"

  "No." His voice was steady as he spoke the solemn truth.

  "There is no answer."

  "Very well."

  He left the shop and spent a quarter hour wandering around the streets with no apparent destination, pausing frequently to window-shop and check the faces of pedestrians around him. If he was being followed, the tail was clever — he couldn't spot him.

  When Rashad was satisfied, he walked back to the hotel, retrieved his motorbike and set off northbound through the crush of morning traffic. In the shadow of Hosseinieh, the Shiite stronghold, he turned off into a maze of narrow side streets, dodging dogs and ragged children as they crossed his path. The streets hadn't been swept in living memory, and mounds of garbage lined the gutters. On his left a block of houses had been scoured by fire. More children scampered through the ruins, hands and faces black with soot.

  His target was a seedy warehouse on the outskirts of the residential district. Pulling up outside, Rashad turned off his engine and dismounted, wheeling the bike ahead of him as he approached the doors. He pushed the buzzer, waited and was just about to try again, when footsteps sounded on the concrete floor inside. A bolt was thrown and the door eased open. A baleful eye examined him as if for symptoms of disease.

  "I have an urgent message for Selim."

  "Your number?"

  "Seventeen."

  "Come in."

  He pushed the bike inside and propped it on the kick-stand, safe from thieves and urchins on the street. The watchman took his knife and pistol, waited while he turned his empty pockets out, then led him down an empty corridor that terminated with the entrance to the warehouse proper. Swinging doors gave access to the cavernous interior. A glassed-in office stood in the corner to his left.

  Rashad was patient while his escort entered, muttered something to his contact and emerged to wave him through. The watchman held his weapons in one hand, thick fingers wrapped around the lethal steel.

  "You pick these up before you leave," he said, and then the door snicked shut behind him, leaving them alone.

  Selim didn't stand up. He put no stock in courtesy and dealt with his informers brusquely, wasting no more time than he found absolutely necessary.

  "Yes?11

  Rashad breathed deeply, marshaling his thoughts. It was important that Selim should be impressed, or his report might go no further, and he'd be cheated of his just reward.

  "I have a message for the man in charge."

  "Go on, I'm listening."

  "I must deliver it myself."

  Selim expelled a weary sigh. "You have no business with the masters," he replied. "If they saw everyone who brings them urgent messages, there would be time for nothing else."

  "You don't understand. There's a stranger, an American…"

  Selim was on his feet before Rashad could finish, gripping his lapel with one hand, flourishing a slim
blade in the other, pressing it against his captive's throat.

  "The name!" he demanded.

  Rashad's life didn't flash before his eyes, but he saw Death, up close and personal. If he didn't speak swiftly, truthfully, there would be no reward. No riches. Nothing.

  Sucking in a ragged breath, he held it long enough to feel the blade bite deeper, nearly drawing blood.

  "Belasko."

  * * *

  After breakfast Bashir Moheden drove Bolan to the powder factory that was disguised as an evacuated tenement in Baalbek's dreary slum. There were no sentries on the street, but Bolan made a rapid scan, detecting snipers in a couple of the upstairs windows, opposite. The children of the streets were wise enough to quit their games and run for home when they recognized the dealer's limousine.

  Inside, two Arabs sporting automatic rifles, pistols strapped around their waists, snapped to attention as Moheden entered. One of them was also carrying a walkie-talkie on his belt, and Bolan knew the lookouts in surrounding tenements had radioed word of their arrival.

  An elevator took them up three floors, and they were greeted by another pair of gunmen on arrival. One peeled off and led them down a murky corridor, through double doors that opened on the lab itself. Before they entered, both men were handed surgical masks. They took a moment to fit the gauze rectangles over nose and mouth. Inside, they were delivered to a swarthy overseer who did everything but bow and scrape before his master.

  The overseer, guards and chemists all wore masks against the risk of breathing caustic fumes or residue from the narcotics in production. With their lab coats and their swimming goggles, the technicians all resembled extras from a 1950s science fiction movie, bent on whipping up a monster in their lab. In fact the poison they produced had been responsible for putting countless monsters on the street. But these men never gave a second thought to consequences.

  Moheden's eyes betrayed a hint of pride as he led Bolan down the line, delivering a minilecture on the technique of refining heroin from opium. "The raw material is first converted into morphine," he explained, "a relatively simple process, which reduces the original bulk by ninety percent. In the final stage, morphine is boiled with acetic anhydride — a chemical closely related to the acetic acid found in common vinegar — and the resultant product is diacetylmorphine. Heroin."

  They moved along the sturdy tables, past retorts, beakers and Bunsen burners hissing flame. The chemists never glanced up from their work, and Bolan wondered whether they were industrious or frightened of the man who paid their salaries.

  "Our product is ninety-nine percent pure," the Lebanese went on. "It isn't, in your charming vernacular, 'stepped on. A bargain at four thousand dollars per kilo, I'm sure you'll agree."

  "And the volume?"

  "I estimate three thousand kilos per annum from this plant alone. A second lab wouldn't be difficult or costly to establish, if your business should require a larger quantity."

  "That's something we can talk about in time. Six thousand kilos over two years, at a cost of four grand each, makes twenty-four million, give or take."

  "You mentioned thirty."

  "So I did. Let's say I sell the package to my sponsors at a kilo-price of five grand each. That's half the going rate in Hong Kong, and they shouldn't bitch. If you can satisfy your partners with the four-grand tag, that leaves us three mill each to play with, when we're finished."

  "Ah. The wonders of mathematics."

  "Have we got a deal?"

  Before Moheden could reply, someone rapped sharply on the door. The foreman waddled over to admit a sentry from the corridor, with two men on his heels. One of the tagalongs struck Bolan as familiar, but he couldn't place the eyes, and all the rest was hidden by a square of gauze. The new arrivals were glaring at Bolan, and he felt a worm of apprehension squirming in his gut. These guys were trouble.

  The foreman beckoned Moheden, glancing over at a gunner on the sidelines nearest Bolan. The dealer wore a puzzled look as he excused himself and crossed the floor. The gunner, meanwhile, seemed to know precisely what was coming, and he moved to stand behind the Executioner, almost within arm's reach.

  It clicked for Bolan as Moheden huddled with the new arrivals. He's seen the shorter of the men just recently, when he was staying in the camp of Joseph Chamoun. A traitor! And his presence in the powder factory — the burning glance from Bashir Moheden — could only mean that Bolan's cover had been blown.

  He moved before the opposition had a chance, reaching inside his jacket and snaring the Beretta as he spun to face the nearest gunner. Bolan shot him in the face, a single round that turned his nose into a gaping wound. He caught the folding-stock Kalashnikov before it dropped from lifeless fingers, pivoting to bring the second laboratory gunner under fire.

  His target was responding, but it was too little and too late. The second round from Bolan's pistol drilled the shooter's throat and knocked him off his feet, already dead before his body hit the floor. Still spinning, Bolan found the AK-47's trigger, held it down and watched all hell break loose.

  His first rounds swept along the table, exploding glassware, raising clouds of million-dollar dust. One lab technician stopped a bullet and went down, thrashing in the sudden snowstorm. Others scattered in search of cover that didn't exist.

  The floor boss had a pistol in his hand as Bolan spun to face him, but the other members of his tiny group were leaping wide to save themselves. He had a glimpse of Bashir Moheden's retreating back before the dealer reached the outer corridor and disappeared. Then the warrior's attention was consumed by details of the task at hand.

  He nailed the foreman with a straggling burst that stitched across his chest from right to left and slammed him over in his tracks. The new arrivals, strange and familiar face alike, were breaking for the doors, to follow Moheden, when Bolan cut them down and left them writhing on the floor. He had a moment's grace before the guards arrived, and it was time enough to spot a fire escape outside the nearest window.

  Bolan moved on instinct and tried to raise the window, but it had been nailed or painted shut. He swung the folding-stock Kalashnikov against the flyspecked pane and battered out the glass, stepping through as cursing figures filled the narrow door behind him.

  The Executioner let them have a parting burst, which kicked up another storm of powder. Then he was out, but it could still go either way, and all the odds lay with the house. He was outnumbered, easily outgunned.

  And he was running for his life.

  * * *

  Moheden waited in the corridor outside the lab, prepared to flee again if necessary. He wasn't a hero and had never posed as one. If necessary, he could kill, but decades had elapsed since he'd been called upon to fight with weapons like a common soldier.

  With a measure of relief, he heard the sounds of battle fading, muffled as the sentries took their hunt outside. The fire escape! He turned and barked an order to the gunmen standing at his side. They bobbed their heads and retreated toward the elevator at a run to call up reinforcements on the street below.

  The dealer pushed the door back and stepped inside the lab, his nose wrinkling at the smell of cordite and the stench of human waste. After one step across the threshold, he nearly lost his footing in a slick of blood spread out before him, seeping from two prostrate forms. His spy, Selim, and the informer from the rebel camp — what was his name? — had fallen almost side by side. Moheden edged around their bodies, found the operation supervisor lying crumpled in his path and paused to take stock of the carnage.

  At least five men dead, with the equipment shot to hell and merchandise destroyed. They might save some of it if they were quick enough, but the American had cost him roughly thirty thousand wholesale dollars in about ten seconds.

  Moheden had been blind. The bastard was an agent of some kind, perhaps assigned to gather information on their network, and he had invited him inside, conducting what amounted to a guided tour of future targets. They would have to move the laboratory no
w, or what was left of it, before the police arrived. Long years of bribery would slow them down, but they were still a factor to be reckoned with, and the Americans might prod them into swifter action.

  But, the fields…

  A laboratory could be moved in hours — even moments, if the bulk of its equipment had been trashed like this one — but a thousand-acre farm wasn't exactly portable. He thought about the prospect of a sweep along the Bekaa, ripe fields withering before a wall of flame, and cringed inside. It took a moment for him to regain composure, realizing that the threat he visualized, while awesome, had no basis in reality.

  Assuming the Americans had struck some kind of bargain with the Beirut government — a prospect that was difficult to swallow — the crucial problem would be practical enforcement. Lebanese police and military officers had carried no authority within the Bekaa Valley for a decade, yielding tacitly to occupation by the Syrians and local strongmen as their troubles had multiplied around Beirut. Whatever deal the White House or its newly christened "drug czar" might attempt to make with Lebanese officials, Washington had no significant influence with the Syrians, much less the Shiite warlords of the Bekaa.

  Around him, various survivors of the shoot-out were attempting to bring order out of chaos, turning off the Bunsen burners, picking shards of glass from drifts of snowy powder, sweeping up around the tables. Snapping orders right and left, Moheden chose another foreman on the spot, dismissed the startled chemist's thanks, demanding that the lab be broken down and moved within the hour. Sooner, if they had it in them.

  Turning from the mess, the dealer left them to it. He had other, even more unpleasant duties to perform. He'd be forced to tell his partners now that he had been deceived. His judgment on the tall American had been mistaken. Ail of them were presently at risk because Moheden had been thinking with his purse instead of with his brain.