Don Pendleton - The Libya Connection

The raging tide of fire across the weapons stash and buildings below was like a sea of flame.

In the shifting, flickering patterns of light, the killing machine had one microsecond to see a Libyan chopper come zeroing in on him full-throttle from behind.

He yanked the controls, jarring his big Huey smartly into a sharp evasive maneuver at the same instant that the other aircraft's cannons opened fire.

The sound pounded at his ears. It enveloped him.

Jack Grimaldi, in the snappy Boeing 1041 V/STOL, entered the fray from out of the southeast. He confronted the Libyan chopper nearly head-on as they converged on the Huey piloted by Mack Bolan.

The Aujila oasis army base below them was nothing but a burning hellground of devastation and confusion.

One human being named Mack Bolan had been at work down there. Far larger than any machine.

The Huey jarred to its port side and fell sharply.

A stream of tracers lasered out from the Libyan aircraft's 40mm's into nothing but dark air.

The Libyan chopper banked around for another run and a look at the sudden unexpected arrival of the unmarked V/STOL.

Grimaldi sent a sizzling stream of bullets from his own 50-cal. machine guns after the Libyan army aircraft. He thought he saw a line of holes dotting across the fuselage of the chopper. But the Libyan aircraft was not stopped or even slowed.

Grimaldi raised Bolan on the tac net.

"Striker! Let's move tail outa here!"

"Not yet, Jack." Bolan's voice came strong and in command across the crackle of static. "That's a slice of Hell down there. We've got to level it."

"Evita? Is she all right?"

"She's dead, Jack. They made turkey meat out of her."

"Oh, sweet Christ."

"We level the dump," growled Bolan.

There was a metallic quality to the voice that Grimaldi had never heard before.

Grimaldi tasted bile trying to rise in his own throat. His knuckles were white around the V/STOL's controls.

Eve was dead.

The pilot had always loved that woman. Loved, yeah. The way a brother-in-law digs a sweet sister-in-law.

"Consider 'em leveled," Grimaldi radioed back.

He hardly recognized his own voice.

The Libyan chopper had looped back for more.

Grimaldi banked around, coming back to where Bolan's Huey held in a stationary hover.

The pilot of the Libyan chopper no doubt thought he had a good chance at taking them both with one blistering strafe run from north to south with the 40mm booming.

Grimaldi arced the V/STOL back into an evasive twist, the shrill whistling of the jet more piercing than before in his ears.

Bolan's voice crackled across the tac net.

"I've got him, Jack."

Grimaldi heard the Huey's turret-mounted machine guns crackle a tattoo that ultimately outlasted the hammering of the Libyans' fire. The Soviet-made chopper hurtled through airspace separating Bolan and Grimaldi.

Jack Grimaldi caught a sudden side view, as the Libyan helicopter thundered past his cockpit, of a man in a bemedaled military uniform, staring out from that chopper over his dead pilot's shoulder with a look of frenzied, panicky realization.

Colonel Ahmad Shahkhia was pounding his fists against the aircraft's Plexiglas window, screaming something as his chopper went down.

The explosion of the Libyan copter's fuel tank as it crashed below, out of sight, was only a dull thud sound to Grimaldi's ears.

Bolan piloted the Huey on a course toward the Aujila oasis installation. Grimaldi flew another tight pattern and came in too.

The Huey chopper opened fire on the base with its big 40mm cannons on full auto mode as Bolan swooped in.

Shahkhia's rebel troops down below were sent scattering and falling. Their ranks were decimated by the criss-cross of machine gun and air-to-surface missiles from above.

Grimaldi delivered hellfire and destruction with the V/STOL's full missile capability: three fast runs interwoven around the Huey's found targets.

The night shuddered with explosions.

The two attacking aircraft leveled every standing structure amid pandemonium born of erupting mortar and tossing human bodies and equipment.

It took Bolan and Grimaldi seven minutes to destroy the Aujila army installation.

When Bolan appeared to be satisfied, he banked the big Huey gunship off into an easterly flight.

Grimaldi did the same. They would both land soon and he would take aboard the big guy.

Eve Aguilar was dead.

Jack Grimaldi was still trying to absorb that awful fact.

As the fires of destruction receded away below and behind them, Grimaldi patched himself through to Bolan.

"Do you read me, Striker?"

There followed a longer pause than Grimaldi expected.

Then Bolan responded in that same iced metal voice.

"I read you, buddy. Thanks. Let's set these babies down. I want to get away from here."

"Roger. Mack, listen... I don't know what to say. About Eve, I mean. The bastards..."

"I know how you feel, Jack. It's almost over."

"Almost?"

"I thought it would end at Aujila," said Bolan. "That wasn't the last step. It's the next to last step."

"There's one more hit?"

"One more hit," acknowledged the grim guy piloting the Huey as the chopper and V/STOL continued their northeasterly flight. "There's a Tripoli address on the pilot's flight pad in this chopper. That's got to mean something. I'm going to find out what."

Cruising at three thousand feet through the cold Sahara night, Jack Grimaldi thought that if Death had a voice, it would sound exactly like the Executioner when Mack Bolan spoke those words.

Bolan did not continue the conversation.

Grimaldi signed off, leaving the big warrior alone with his thoughts.

All words were empty at a time like this, thought Grimaldi.

Only the pain inside was real.

Time magazine, in a cover story, had coined him The Most Wanted Fugitive in the World.

He stood at the half-open French windows of the penthouse terrace, overlooking the view of Tripoli by night, and chuckled at the thought of that magazine sobriquet.

Leonard Jericho had acquired such distinction without ever having killed a man.

He finished his drink, a very strong whiskey and soda, and moved from the French windows to the portable bar to fix himself another.

He decided that it might be a good idea to strap on the Walther PPK .380 automatic that was now wrapped in its shoulder holster in the top desk drawer.

He would feel better, armed.

Leonard Jericho was a man of precautions. The nature of his business dealings placed him in a vulnerable position relative to various law enforcement agencies, to say nothing of his own business associates, past and present, many of whom thought they would, or could, gain much from his demise.

All due precautions had been taken, here in Tripoli as everywhere his dealings took him, including a guard out on the terrace and more armed men in the vestibule outside the front door of the penthouse.

And of course there were those two plastic surgery doubles he had used. There was Carlyle in the Bahamas. Gifford had taken his place at the Aujila rendezvous with Colonel Shahkhia. Jericho trusted no one, least of all treacherous desert rats like the buyer for that virus. Jericho would not be surprised if Shahkhia thought he had some foolproof plan for kidnapping "Leonard Jericho" at the oasis and holding him for billions in ransom. Jericho had chosen not to give Shahkhia the opportunity. He sent Gifford instead.

But there had been no word from the Aujila base!

Leonard Jericho sensed that something had gone wrong.

At this moment, he was awaiting word that his car had been brought around to the Tripoli safehouse from which The Most Wanted Fugitive in the World had been operating under the guise of an anonymous U.S. oil-company lackey.