The Iranian Hit te-42 Page 4

  He tapped the desk top impatiently.

  "Personally I hope these assassins are stuck with PPSH-41 submachine guns that Iran manufactured for Russia during World War Two. Not a very impressive 9mm weapon, and Iran has stacks of them."

  Brognola was clutching at straws, partly to placate April's concern as they considered the conflict to come.

  But that concern was only made the worse by Hal's talk of weapon smuggling. It was incredible to April that there were Americans who would willingly participate in the illegal importation of arms into the country, especially guns to be used against the security and stability of the state.

  People involved in the international flow of weaponry were jackals. She had researched the stories of the past few years about disgruntled secret agents turning to the highest bidder. She knew that score. Certainly where Libya was involved, so was a whole network of Westerners who saw profit in chaos, and they were rapacious animals. They were also diseased with greed. They would be their own undoing. It was hardly worth pursuing them before they choked on their own poisons.

  "Will they smuggle everything in? Ammunition, grenades, launchers?" she asked.

  "There's no other way they can secure that stuff," Hal replied, in a ruminative mood again. "But I'm not going to worry about that part of it. The treachery of officials and merchants within the country will take another mission altogether.

  "My chief concern is that Striker has sufficient back-up from the people already at Nazarour's place. God knows what sort of characters the general's got lined up there, but unless they are all one hundred percent behind our man, he could conceivably be overwhelmed by force of numbers.

  "Nazarour's little army has got to stand behind Striker. Otherwise Yazid's mob has the advantage, even if Yazid comes rushing in with rusty old UAR Carl Gustavs stolen from the ruins of the last Mid-East war...." The weary man chuckled humorlessly at his own personal picture of Third World incompetence.

  "You're tired," April said. "Take a break. I'll stand in for you."

  Brognola turned in his chair to stare at the phone.

  Waiting for it to ring, to tell him whether Bolan was at Potomac yet, to tell him that everything was on track.

  No, he would not leave this desk, under any circumstances. There was a small window facing east over the desk. He would see the dawn, sitting here.

  He would see Mack Bolan wind up another mission.

  Or he would see Mack Bolan fail. And die. For such a thing could happen. This was Bolan's third mile and the numbers would always be getting chancier.

  Memories of Washington's 14th Street bridge, the 737 in collision with it in the winter of 1982, the awful travesty of human destiny that plunged the airline passengers into the icy twilight waters of the Potomac, haunted Brognola as he thought of the locale of this latest mission, this new taunting of death.

  There was a feeling in his gut that one of these days, one of these missions, Mack was going to get really hurt. His star had shone lucky for a long time now, backed by Mack's extraordinary skills and by a courage that eliminated all fear of death, as if he was, in a way, dead already. But that star might dim at any time. It was as if he could follow Striker's story only with an increasing certainty that, soon, something was going to put out the light.

  "Christ Almighty," blurted Hal, still glaring at the phone. "Let me be! I'll hold the fort."

  April Rose's nerve snapped at the harshness of his tone. Her modellike poise seemed to disintegrate as she leaned toward Brognola's impassive face and said scornfully at him, "Stop acting like a fool, sir. You'll do yourself harm and you'll jeopardize Mack..."

  "And you stop, Stony Man Two, right now," said Hal, each syllable like a gunshot. "You speak above your station."

  "For heaven's sake..."

  "Quiet! I am White House liaison on the Phoenix Project." His patience had gone. "Frankly I have been concerned for some time about the hazards involved in your emotions toward Colonel Phoenix, and you force me to raise the issue."

  "Sir, in matters of the heart..."

  "The heart be damned! Listen to what I'm saying!" shouted Brognola. He didn't aim to hurt. His intention was to define and deploy. "It is you who are endangering our enterprise. Your feelings for Mack put the long-term outcome at risk for the sake of a short-term, panicky response."

  April's eyes were misting. Her superior's commanding manner and sudden thrust of criticism had cornered her. But she was not fainthearted, ever. She was a veteran of the Justice Department's Sensitive Operations Group and she had been rated expert at rocketry systems skills, .38 revolver use, electronic surveillance. This statuesque beauty was no blushing flower. Her rebound strategy right now was a defense based on subtle but vigorous attack.

  "You know you cannot question my integrity, Hal," she said, standing tall again. "I don't panic. If there is a problem in all this waiting — in this suspense — it is your own stubbornness. You're hard as stone, and you cannot hear the heartbeat."

  "Meaning?"

  "When was the last time you spent an evening with Margaret? When did you last see either Catherine or Michelle?"

  A wry smile forced its way onto Brognola's lips. The mention of his wife, so dear to him, and his two grown daughters now had him at the disadvantage. He hadn't been home to share time with his wife for days and days, since well before Mack began mopping up in Minneapolis. His daughters, fine women both of them, one now in Ohio, the other married in New York, had by necessity become voices at the end of the telephone. Hal slowly rubbed his brow with a stubby hand.

  "You think I'd be a more helpful person to us all if I put in an appearance at home occasionally, is that it?" he sighed.

  "More or less," April replied, smiling slightly. "You do need a break, Hal. For the sake of your own family and for Stony Man."

  "I'm thirty years older than you are, young lady. What do you know about an old man's needs? I never mention my family, they are my secret. But you're right. This tension is getting to me. We all need a support system...."

  He looked at her sheepishly, his eyes now twinkling with humor. "Will you forgive me for yelling at you, Miss Rose?"

  "I cracked and I'm the one who's sorry," said April, turning slightly to face the wall covered in charts, a map of the world and a map of the U.S. "It's just that I can't bear it when Mack is at the mercy of those who aid and abet terrorism. I do have personal feelings for him, yes, and I have done ever since he saved my life in Tennessee.''

  Brognola nodded. It was an incredible time back then and he would never forget it. The episode April referred to was when the USJD had given Striker one week to hit six areas and finish off that particular bloody mile. In those days, of course, April was a fervent pacifist, and accepting an assignment as driver of the War Wagon was as aggressive as she would get. Until the Mob got its hands on her in Nashville and Bolan had to blaze his way to her rescue. Since then she had become a new woman.

  "If there are people helping a hit team to operate in this country," she continued, "then I want us to take out those people now."

  "Sure, April, I know," agreed Brognola, his respect for this strong woman confirmed by everything she said. "It's bad enough that we have a hit team in the country at all — definitely an event of the late seventies and eighties. It would have been unheard of at any other time. Makes me feel like an old man….

  "But the truth is, we don't have any information on who their accomplices are. Yet. I'm reasonably certain that there are no pro-Iranian gunrunners and arms dealers among the new amateurs at that business. I mean any of those out-of-work Special Forces vets hanging around for some action in Fayetteville or Hawaii. It's my opinion that the supply route is through a different sort of organization altogether."

  "That's interesting," said April, her eyebrows raised in anticipation.

  "I think the arms source has been too skillfully covert, too successful, for a bunch of embittered ex-soldiers moaning about social neglect. I believe we'll find some old friends
from civilian life involved in this. I look forward to the unraveling of it."

  "You mean the Mob, don't you?" April was barely able to conceal her pleasure at identifying the enemy. And it was an enemy already decimated by Mack, it just needed to be hacked back every now and again. Great. This would be an adversary he could get his teeth into, deep into the carotid artery once more. Things were looking up at last. Her body responded with exhilaration at the thought of it, extinguishing exhaustion.

  "Hal," she said, picking up a wrapped stogie from the head fed's desk and handing it over to him in a celebratory gesture. "Have another cigar."

  For the first time that night, Hal smiled with something approximating real delight. "I think I will," he said, grinding the dead butt of his previous one in the ashtray. "And yourself?"

  "Thanks, but no," grinned April Rose. "I'm trying to give them up."

  "Good for you," grunted Hal, enjoying himself for this fleeting moment. "Come on, let's get some more coffee and fill in the time with some calls of our own. I've got an idea a little detective work is required of us."

  6

  Bolan had known physical giants who had been weak and as easily intimidated as lambs. Now here was a guy in a wheelchair, whom Bolan sized up immediately as probably one of the strongest, toughest, craftiest men he had ever confronted.

  Sure, Bolan had seen his kind before. A cannibal. Blood brother to the Mafia dons that Bolan had deceived during his previous "life." A guy whose driving wheel was the lust to exploit and gain for his own ends, no matter what the cost to others. That lust was fueled by a strength of will that would only be conquered by death.

  And somehow General Nazarour knew that Bolan had brought Carol Nazarour back to the grounds.

  How much else did he know? Bolan wondered.

  Finally he responded to Nazarour's query regarding the general's wife.

  "Why not ask the lady herself?" Bolan grunted. "I'm not here to play question and answer, General. Nor to take orders. I'm here to protect your ass until dawn." He glanced across the room at the second Iranian. "Rafsanjani. I want you to take me on a tour of the house, then take me to your security chief."

  Rafsanjani paused, looking at General Nazarour.

  The general seemed to be considering something. Then he nodded and some of his coldness thawed. He seemed to Bolan like a jungle animal relaxing. But an animal of prey nonetheless.

  "Forgive me, Colonel. Perhaps I was a bit presumptuous. But I would ask you to consider my situation and not 'stonewall' it, as you Americans amusingly say. My life is at stake here. You are a military man. I am a military man. I observe signs of a struggle about the knees of your slacks. I must know what I'm up against. Have you engaged the enemy?"

  Bolan changed tactics, too. It would do no good to alienate Nazarour. The odds tonight were already stacked.

  "I engaged someone," Bolan nodded. "Some men tried to abduct your wife. I intervened."

  The general's face remained impassive. "Were they Iranian?"

  "Not that I could see. We shot it out over in the Canal Park. I killed six of them."

  Nazarour's eyes blazed. "You might have learned something from them," he snapped. "You could have questioned them."

  "I had no choice. Any idea who they were?"

  "None. Unless they were working in connection with this assassination team."

  "That's not very likely," grunted Bolan. "From what I've heard, this team doesn't need any help. Now if you'll excuse me, General, I'll be about my business."

  Rafsanjani stood by the door, holding it open for Bolan but with his eyes on Nazarour.

  Nazarour read the unspoken question and nodded. "Show him everything he wishes to see," he instructed his aide. "And send my men in here."

  "Yes, General."

  Bolan stepped out into the corridor, and Rafsanjani followed, easing the study door shut behind him. Bolan glanced up and down the hallway. There was no sign of Carol Nazarour.

  "How did the general know that Mrs. Nazarour and I came back together?" he asked the aide.

  Rafsanjani's eyes were cold as polished marble. "The general is master of this house," he replied coolly. "My allegiance is to the general. I owe him my life. I would do anything for him." Here he paused for effect. "Please wait, Colonel, while I see to the guards. Then we shall begin our tour."

  * * *

  The old house was as much a museum as a residence. It had been modernized, of course, in all the necessary ways. But the renovation was so skillful and so complete that Bolan found Rafsanjani's tour of the premises to be almost like stepping into the past. Civil war decor graced one room, while another room was furnished in a turn-of-the-century motif. And above it all hovered emanations of still something else.

  Something decadent.

  Bolan and Rafsanjani were at the southwest corner of the house, checking the metal mesh that secured a pantry window, when Bolan gave voice to his thoughts.

  "Tell me," he said conversationally, as he and the secretary were leaving the pantry toward the stairway to the second floor. "Do you ever pick up certain...certain vibes, living in this place?"

  Rafsanjani permitted himself a thin-lipped smile. He seemed to see Bolan in a new light. "My respects, Colonel. You are a man attuned to the metaphysical planes of existence. There is indeed an... aura about this old house." The Iranian spoke almost reverently. "Perhaps it is the evil that the house has absorbed from its inhabitants over the past century."

  "When was it built?"

  "Some five years before your Civil War. In 1855. The general had me thoroughly research the title of the house when we moved here earlier this year. There is new money and there is old money in Potomac, or so I am told. This house goes very far back in time. Much has happened within its walls."

  "Much that was evil?"

  "The man who built the house was an arms manufacturer," said Rafsanjani. "A profiteer. He went on to make a fortune by selling his wares to both sides of that conflict. The building was renovated around the turn of the century by a gentleman who was adept in financial maneuverings in the areas of railroads, oil fields, and coal mines. A subsidiary corporation of a major oil company now holds the title. Yes, I would venture to say that much evil has transpired between these walls during this past century. Many souls have been bartered for."

  "And your soul, Rafsanjani," Bolan said quietly, his eyes carefully scrutinizing everything as they walked, "what of it? Has it been sold to the devil?"

  This brought only another thin-lipped smile. They had reached the second-floor foyer. The stairway had been widened to provide space for a motorized conveyor equipped to handle a wheelchair. Rafsanjani moved briskly toward a door at the head of the stairs, acting as if a brief metaphysical discourse had never occurred.

  "This is the general's room," he announced as he opened the door and stood aside for Bolan to enter. "I would request that you give it an especially detailed examination..."

  Bolan gave a thorough inspection to the general's bedroom. The window faced the front yard of the house. A skilled commando — as the men in Yazid's group undoubtedly were — would have no difficulty scaling the wall below the bedroom window and gaining access that way. There was no other means of outside entrance, and the general would be safe enough up here if there was a guard to protect the stairway and upper foyer — and the entire exterior.

  It took Bolan and Rafsanjani only seventeen minutes to complete their security check of the house, but it was a thorough job. Bolan had inspected every room, every nook and cranny in that old pile of brick.

  Except for one.

  The door to Carol Nazarour's room was locked. No one responded to Rafsanjani's discreet but distinct rapping on the wood panel. And Rafsanjani claimed not to have a key.

  "My orders are never to disturb Mrs. Nazarour unless it is under the most extreme conditions," the aide explained. They were waiting for a response that was not forthcoming.

  "Have you seen her since she came back into the house?
" asked Bolan.

  "I have not."

  "Has the general spoken with her?"

  Rafsanjani's hooded eyes became wary. "I do not know. As I explained earlier, Colonel, my allegiance is to the general. This is purely a logistical alliance between you and us. Do not involve yourself in analyzing the relationships that confront you here, Colonel. We will separate in a few hours, never to see each other again. Mrs. Nazarour's room is identical to her husband's. That is all you need for our purposes tonight." He turned away from the door. "Let us continue...."

  "Relax, buddy," Bolan replied. "If the lady needs privacy, that's all right with me. I'll be around if she wants to talk to me later." He made sure he was close to the door and speaking loudly.

  A simple mission. Uh huh.

  As he and Rafsanjani moved on to the next room, Bolan found himself formulating a theory about Carol Nazarour and those hoods who had tried to become kidnappers and ended up dead men in the C&O Canal Park — and about the man Nazarour's wife had been on her way to meet. The man Bolan had seen gunned down.

  If Bolan's theory was correct, then Carol Nazarour's intentions and allegiance would be a crucial factor in the general's safety tonight.

  Bolan hoped like hell that the lady had been listening behind that bedroom door. That she would make contact with him.

  The blonde was a beauty. Of that there was no doubt.

  But Bolan wondered what else Carol Nazarour was.

  Where would her allegiance rest when the coming battle was raging? Would she be friend?

  Or foe?

  He had doubts about her capacity for what might be called civilized behavior. She seemed to have bartered her integrity for a lousy price already. Though it was not yet possible to be sure of that.

  But about the civilized behavior of the non-nationals in this place he had no doubts whatsoever. All politeness was show. Gentility was a sham. The true nature of these exiles was barbarous: for them, life was cheap — unless it was their own.