Don Pendleton - Beirut Payback

The woman was pleading for her life.

The camou-clad militiamen laughed and lifted their AK-47'S. The situation was ready to explode as sweaty nervous glances of anticipation darted from man to man before the barbarians opened fire. But when violence erupted in that street it came from the open driver's window of the passing Saab.

Bolan triggered the AK-47 he held across his chest, his right finger caressing the trigger while he drove with the left hand.

The blistering fusillade of automatic fire from the Saab pulped the three Shiite gunmen into flying shreds.

The woman and her son continued on with their precious bottled water.

Exiting from the alley, Bolan steered back onto a principal thoroughfare parallel to the first and approached the shopping center commandeered by the Druse militia.

Again, the contrast of everyday life so close to the killing touched Bolan with chilling awareness.

Almost every other Lebanese he saw along his route carried or stood near transistor radios, listening obsessively for new developments.

Beirut buzzed with desperation.

Static firing, grenade and rifle sniping continued all along the nearby Green Line that divided east and west Beirut.

According to the English-speaking announcer's voice from the Saab's dashboard radio, the conflict was escalating into severe clashes.

As Bolan listened, the broadcaster explained how Lebanese army armored vehicles were attempting to advance from the museum crossing point halfway down the Green Line but were being repelled in a fierce battle.

The prize was the crumbling gutted tower and rubble heap of destroyed St. Michael's Church, where heavy fighting had gone on since the week before for control of the church. The army said it had captured the church and lost it and now wanted to recapture it.

Big deal, Bolan thought.

It had to stop.

Piles of dirt had been placed around the entrance to the Muslim militia headquarters to prevent counterattack by the Lebanese. But the ten-foot-high pyramids of earth actually helped Bolan hide the Saab a block and a half from the base entrance. From his concealed position he could observe vehicles arriving and leaving without fear of detection from the Druse sentries inside the base. The dirt piles blocked their vision.

At one point a tank lumbered out from between the mounds of earth. The Soviet-manufactured machine rumbled past the Saab. Bolan leaned sideways below window level, hidden from the observation window of the war machine or the driver's or gunner's periscopes.

The tank clanked on past and turned a corner, then rumbled out of sight, the crawler track clattering on pavement toward the Green Line and the fighting.

Before the tank's noise had faded, another vehicle emerged from the Druse base and turned in Bolan's direction.

The Executioner got ready, finger on the trigger of the reloaded AK-47 in case this wasn't the connection Uri claimed he could use to set up Bolan's penetration of Strakhov's headquarters summit.

The meeting would be the biggest gathering of terrorist warlords that a peace-bringer named Bolan, a soldier who cared, could ever hope to target for extinction.

A jeep with Syrian markings approached Bolan's position. It was driven by a Druse militiaman accompanied by a shotgun-riding gunman, his assault rifle pointed skyward.

The vehicle, much like the one Bolan had escaped in from Zahle a few hours before, upshifted past the Saab and this time Bolan did not hunch down but sat there with his AK ready to fire. But that proved unnecessary because the vehicle chugged by with neither driver nor soldier sparing the Saab a sideways glance as they drove past him.

As the jeep cruised by, Bolan recalled his parting conversation with Uri Weizmann.

"We have a man planted in the Druse militia," Weizmann had told Bolan before they split up outside the pub. "A driver. We've spent two years planting him. I can't afford to lose him."

"Your man will have time to pull out before the air strike."

"The driver and a soldier will leave the Druse motor pool at a garage they took over near to the area where the new recruits are billeted. The chauffeur is supposed to drive with the soldier to pick up Fouad Zakir, the militia's strategist and liaison with the Syrian command at Zahle."

The pair continued away from the Saab, away from the base, without turning off at the corner as the tank had.

When they reached the middle of the next block, Bolan pulled the Saab out from the curb and followed the vehicle at a discreet distance.

The jeep went a quarter mile, then the wheelman steered onto a several-square-block wasteland of completely gutted, devastated buildings that happened to be well behind the lines of heavy fighting.

The duo pulled over to what had been the curb of a trashed zone.

Bolan drove toward the jeep and could see the soldier who had been riding shotgun jumping awkwardly out from the vehicle and trying to bring up his rifle to aim at the driver. Then a pistol in the driver's fist barked once just as Bolan came to a halt behind the jeep.

The pistol blast spun the soldier around into a death sprawl, a human discard amid the rubble.

Bolan left the Saab and knelt beside the man to relieve him of AK-47 ammo clips at his waist.

The driver of the jeep shot worried glances in either direction.

"Hurry. The area is heavily patrolled by both sides. If it weren't for the fighting elsewhere..."

"I read you," Bolan returned, and quickly climbed into the dead man's uniform. The outfit was ill-fitting, too small, but with Bolan seated it would not be noticed.

Bolan and the driver dragged the body out of sight of the road and hid it in the rubble. Then Bolan took the dead man's place in the passenger seat. The Mossad plant gunned the vehicle away from there.

"Well done, guy." Bolan thanked the Israeli behind the wheel. "I appreciate the help. And the risk you're taking."

"Control said it was essential. After Zakir reaches the base at Zahle, you and I will be expected to wait on base until their meeting is finished." The driver steered along a deserted street.

"Will you be able to get off base without arousing suspicion?" asked Bolan.

The "Druse" chuckled.

"Their organization is a joke. I will drive off base once you and I split up. I will wait nearby until after the air strike. The soldier and I were separated in the fighting. At a time like this, no one will give much of a damn that he was found several miles away. The roads are full of deserters. I'll tell the same to my superiors even if there is no air strike." The Mossad man steel-eyed the American. "If Fouad Zakir survives this day my life will be forfeited."

"I don't think your control would risk a man in your position unless he thought you'd come out alive," Bolan assured the guy. "Leave Zakir to me."

The guy from Mossad braked the vehicle in front of a row of private residences.

"Gladly. He lives right here."

The two "Druse" soldiers proceeded to collect the militia hotshot whose very presence passed them through two Druse checkpoints without problems.

They entered increasingly hostile territory the farther they got from Beirut along the heavily traveled military road into the mountains toward Zahle.

Zakir emanated an arrogance that precluded conversation between himself and the chauffeur and bodyguard.

Bolan felt a gnawing anticipation in his gut with the ascending cool of approaching battle consciousness.

He had bought time for his Beirut payback. The anticipation had a lot to do with that. The payback, uhhuh, would be in the name of America's best, those much maligned, always — there fighting men of the U.S. Marine Corps, trained warriors who hold the front lines to keep American citizens and values alive and free.