Don Pendleton: Beirut Payback

Especially in the heat of battle in a hostile, alien environment.

Especially not on a night like tonight.

The damn thing was, Bolan liked the human being who said she was Zoraya.

She had not faked the humane instinct that transformed the tough, gun-packing Zoraya to gentle protector of the Arab waif.

With the shelling of the city temporarily ceased, the streets funneled a surge of pedestrian and vehicular traffic trying to get out despite the pre-dawn hour. The mass exodus only served to blur already tenuous lines between Muslim and Lebanese Christian forces.

Lines that were impossible for even the militias themselves to determine.

No one slept in the war zone tonight.

The woman drove them from the city along the coast.

A sea breeze cooled the air.

The war seemed not so immediate out here.

They passed djellaba-robed Muslims standing before their homes, observing the noises of war from the direction of the city, ruminating camels tethered to trees.

Both sides of this stretch of the main road were littered with debris: the charred remains of trucks, tanks and human corpses.

Two miles north of Beirut, Zoraya turned onto a secondary road, taking them northeast.

"This leads to Biskinta."

"We've been damn lucky," Bolan noted, never taking his eyes from surveying the dangerous night.

"Twenty-four hours ago, we would not have gotten this far," Zoraya said. "Militia checkpoints were everywhere. But the new fighting has changed everything. The armies are busy with each other." As she spoke those words, the Volvo rounded a bend and Bolan saw the lights of a military checkpoint blockading the road a quarter of a mile ahead.

He positioned himself sideways in the seat, like a man taking a rest. He made a final check to ensure the blacksuit and drawn Beretta were fully concealed. Zoraya slowed the Volvo as they approached the lights.

"The instant it goes wrong," he told her, "get us out of here." The lady looked tough enough and competent behind the wheel.

Bolan kept his finger ready on the silenced 93-R's trigger beneath the blanket.

Zoraya braked to a stop at the checkpoint. A guard shack stood to one side and next to it three men, wearing the informal Druse militiaman's uniform of parka, knit hat, jeans and combat boots.

The three were armed with Russian AK-47 assault rifles.

Another soldier stood beside a jeep, near a radio in case anything went wrong.

Tension crackled in the night as one of the soldiers approached the car.

The others stood behind him, their AK'S leveled.

Bolan feigned sleep.

The Arab beauty would handle the soldier.

Bolan could not understand the dialogue, but the exchange did not need translation. He had briefed Zoraya on what to say.

She showed her papers to the militiaman.

"This is my husband and child. My husband was wounded in the fighting. We have been to the hospital in Beirut but had to leave after his surgery to make room for more wounded. He is heavily sedated, as you can see. We are Druse. We live in Biskinta."

"You are crazy to return," the soldier said gruffly, returning the ID with barely a glance at Bolan or the child. "The fighting in the hills is bad. You should not go back."

"It is our home. We return to get our belongings." At that moment, the little boy in the back seat let out a caterwaul that echoed off eardrums and did not stop.

Zoraya played it to the hilt.

"There, you see?" she bitched. "My child is awake. Do you want to nurse him back to sleep?" The soldier grunted something and stepped back from the car and waved her on through, already half forgetting the refugees and, like his companions, warily scanning the barren darkness around them for the enemy.

Bolan reached for the child, who continued to raise a hellish racket. He tried rocking the kid, making clucking noises that did no good. He became aware of a quiet chuckle from the woman behind the wheel.

"Perhaps we should trade places," Zoraya suggested.

When they made the first dip in the terrain that put them beyond sight of the checkpoint, she steered onto the shoulder.

Zoraya took the little one and when the kid's scared eyes saw her, the squawling diminished to a murmur.

By the time Bolan got behind the wheel, Zoraya had the boy in her lap in the passenger seat, the boy transformed once again into a purring angel.

Bolan allowed a chuckle of his own as he steered the Volvo back onto the road.

"Thanks again." Bolan went back to scanning the night beyond the cone of headlights.

They passed a caravan of four civilian vehicles traveling in the other direction, huddling together for mutual protection.

Zoraya watched the darkness, too, and began crooning soft, soothing tones in Arabic to the child again.

Bolan noticed that the terrain began to incline from the coastal flat into the harsh, rocky foothills of the Shouf mountains.

They would soon be surrounded by Druse artillery, quiet for now, allowing civilian refugees to haunt the roads until the next barrage upon the city.

The Druse militiamen did not want to betray their positions to possible retaliatory air strikes.

The mess in Lebanon ranked in a class of its own, but the issues were simple enough.

The mess resulted from so many disparate Muslim factions forgetting their grievances and cross-purposes with each other and uniting — with considerable aid from the Soviet Union — under the banner of Islam in nothing less than a Jihad, a Holy War, against an opposing alliance of similarly disparate factions, in most cases pro-Western.

Bolan knew some history of the region.

In the eleventh century, a group of nonconformist Muslims infiltrated southern Lebanon, eventually coalescing into the Druse community. Unrest between Muslims and Arab Christians dated to the nineteenth century. Druse opposition to Christians was directed particularly against the Maronites, culminating in a series of bloody attacks.

After a massacre of twenty-five hundred Christians in 1860, France intervened and the Ottoman sultan was forced to appoint a Christian government, which still was in power.

The current trouble exploded when Israel's military invaded Lebanon to destroy once and for all the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Israelis succeeded only in driving out moderate PLO factions while diehard PLO terrorists strengthened themselves in an alliance with the Druse.

Druse and PLO fighters operated jointly against the pro-Israeli, pro-Western Lebanese government, joined by the Iranian crazies and the Syrians, in open civil war. Both sides were driven by real grievances, feeding a bloodlust as exploitable as ever by the cannibals who sat on the sidelines and pulled the strings.

Syria, on Lebanon's border, backed the rebel factions in a bid to subordinate Lebanon without necessarily annexing it.

Syria functioned as the Soviets' muscle in this struggle, though Soviet and Syrian interests were often at odds. The Kremlin preferred its clients to remain relatively weak and thus dependent on Moscow's patronage, but the will of Islam is strong. The Soviet terror machine's strongarms in the Mediterranean would never yield to state over religion, the basic tenet of communism to control the masses.

The Syrian warlords in Damascus played the situation with a hope of making Syria the center of the Arab world. Real power, yeah, but not an easy task for a country with nearly no oil and only ten million people.

Damascus already had the PLO under its thumb.

Control over the terrorist network gave Syria sinister leverage over moderate pro-Western oil producers who were exceedingly vulnerable to terrorism.

The Russian "advisors," of course, played for the big stakes. They wanted this corner of the world-a key to the world slave state their leaders had always envisioned.