He had spoken exactly three sentences to Bolan: "Good evening, sir," "Fifteen minutes to landing, sir," and "Good luck, sir." Between the first and the second, Bolan caught a couple of hours of combat sleep. When he awoke the pain in his shoulder was down to a dull throb that was merely bothersome. The vague silhouette of a pipe-head pumping station was visible near the private desert airstrip where they'd landed. The man in the Nebraska Cornhuskers sweatshirt standing beside the open trunk of the Jaguar had less to say than the pilot. He shone a flashlight over the trunk's contents. Bolan looked them over and nodded. It would do.
It would have to.
The man in the sweatshirt slammed the trunk, handed Bolan the keys, and slipped into darkness.
Seconds later the Jaguar's headlights were slashing across the sandy wasteland, pointed north.
Now, seated in the luxury vehicle across from the House that Betrayal Built, Bolan felt refreshed and ready. At that hour just before dawn, most men's biological clocks tick their slowest, and for that reason it would have been a good time for a strike. But everything else dictated against it.
Frank Edwards was no superstitious Mafia capo, nor a fanatic but ill trained terrorist gunman. He had survived years of espionage work, followed by a meteorological climb on the edge of the shadow world of international violence, because he was smart enough to know he was always living on the heartbeat. The safety of this Tripoli retreat was relative, and Frank Edwards would know that.
The guy was playing on his home court, and if Bolan tried some crazy-haired one-man cavalry charge into the midst of it, he'd never get near the renegade agent.
There was another, although secondary, consideration: the safety of one Toby Ranger.
Bolan's primary mission was to stop Edwards, and if he succeeded there would be one less threat to the gentle people everywhere. And if he succeeded in saving Toby's lovely butt at the same time, so much the better.
Until it was proven absolutely impossible, Bolan would aspire to achieve both goals.
So now it was time for planning, surveillance, logistics. That house across the street any house was like a living organism, and in time would reveal its secrets. That was all the edge Bolan could hope for.
As it turned out, he got a good deal more.
The three men moved like a drill team that had rehearsed this routine so many times it was second nature. Two of them came around the Mercedes diesel sedan, sliding into front and back seat with movement so identical they could have been wired in tandem. As the first guy fired up the ignition, the one standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the woman pushed her into the back of the sedan from the house side, slid in beside her to sandwich her against his partner.
By the time they had started down the villa's curving driveway, Bolan had the Jag started. The Night Vision Goggles were on the dashboard, and pulling the head strap on and comfortably positioning the leather-covered foam face cushion took only a second or two. He had readjusted the eyepiece focus, eye separation, tilt and eye relief, and range focus, and needed only to flick on the power switch under the left tube. The Litton M-802 goggles were the stable-mate of the Pocket Scope, essentially two second-generation passive image intensifiers set in tandem as a self-contained binocular. The disadvantage of the Pocket Scope was the variable magnification of its zoom lens; the goggles were f1med at I X, or unity. But the goggles allowed hands-free operation ideally suited for, among other things, driving. And it looked like Bolan had some driving to do.
The Mercedes came out of the drive with lights doused and turned north, the direction Bolan was facing; The NVD made the interior as visible to Bolan as if the dome light had been lit.
Her blond hair was disheveled, and what Bolan could see of her face was set in a hard mask that could have been frustration, anger or pain. But Bolan would have made her out if she were laughing and bald. It was Toby Ranger, for sure.
Someone was sending her for a ride. Bolan meant to make certain it was not her last one.
Ahead of him the Mercedes's taillights came on and began immediately to recede.
Bolan let the Jag gently idle.
Five beats later, a second vehicle came out of the villa's driveway, a sleek-lined Saab Turbo carrying two men. It turned after the Mercedes. Sure, a tag car was elementary tradecraft. Especially when the lead vehicle was carrying precious cargo.
Bolan eased the Jag into the parade, keeping the headlights off. With the Litton goggles, the brightness control automatically adjusting to streetlights, oncoming vehicles, and other changes in intensity, his night vision without lights was better than the other drivers with. Bolan had recognized one of them, one of the sandwich men in the back of the Mercedes. His name was T.W. Hansen, and he was one of the five suspect-terminations on the list that had also included Corey James, the Valais chalet houseman.
Until just three weeks before, Hansen had been a Master Sergeant in the Special Forces, with fourteen years of service and a record of several successfully completed and sensitive intelligence-related "hard" missions. Then he had suddenly turned up AWOL.
It looked like his status would have to be upgraded to "Deserted." Bolan's task was simple, and yet breathtakingly complex. All he had to do was stop two powerful vehicles, overcome the objections of five experienced and no doubt armed fighting men, and liberate one highly compromised undercover agent without catching her in the cross fire. And accomplish it all on terrain with which he was only vaguely familiar. He could not allow the two cars to reach their destination; the play had to be on neutral territory. But as long as they kept moving, Bolan could be reasonably sure that Toby would remain in one piece. His hunch was that Toby's cover had been blown too recently for them to have milked her of all the valuable information she could reveal. If that were the case and Bolan had to believe it was they were headed for a facility more isolated than the Giorgimpopoli villa.
Somewhere where her screams of anguish would go unheard. They entered the more congested part of Tripoli; even at this early hour traffic had picked up. Bolan risked the headlights and blended into the flow, two cars behind the Saab tail car. At the coast highway, the Saab turned right, to the east. On the left Bolan passed the drying flats of a marine salt distillery. A little farther on was the harbor, and opposite it the mosques of Gurgi and Karamanli, the marble triumphal arch of Marcus Aurelius. The city behind them, they passed through a shanty town, vague figures already stirring in the predawn darkness. Beyond it the Saab turned back south. Bolan doused the lights again and followed.
He was pretty sure now where the two-car caravan was heading. Back in the early days of his military service, then Sergeant Mack Bolan had been aboard a troop transport plane that had landed at Wheelus Air Base for service and refueling. With an hour or so to kill, a couple of Sergeant Bolan's squad had anted up a couple of cartons of American smokes and talked him into trading them for the use of a Jeep for a little sightseeing. They had not had time to go far, but Bolan had a fair recall of the area around the USAF base which they had managed to take in.
Wheelus had been closed since 1970; Khaddafi had kicked out the American "imperialist warmongers" soon after he forcibly grabbed the reins of power. But the physical plant was still mostly intact: runways, hangars, maintenance shops, billets, offices.
It could provide a turnkey base for Frank Edwards's "black" CIA. The gate of Wheelus could be no more than a couple of miles farther on. Here the two-lane road ran straight as an arrow through scrub-grass plain, climbing a slight rise that might provide the last cover for Bolan's play. The two cars ahead of him had tightened to within six lengths of each other, running about fifty miles per hour through the black-gray of predawn.