Soft Targets

Chile; it features a variety of nasty liquids in the bag. Yours may soon qualify as wet,' he added, seeing the runnel of crimson that painted the bag's interior in Charlie's feeble struggles.

Hakim did not glance toward his second cap­tive. Had he done so, he would have seen the big man tearing with his teeth at the fresh tape, gums bleeding, heedless of the pain.

'Why, you ask, and ask, and ask,' Hakim con­tinued, crooning near as though speaking to a valued confidante, a beloved. 'Because you will perhaps return to your sumptuous life, if it pleases me. You will be my message to your medium, a man who knows he has been totally broken. El Aurans, the Lawrence of Arabia, broke after long torture and found ambition gone. Few were his equal but,' the dark eyes held a soft luminosity of madness as he quoted, ''My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance ... blow my empty soul away.' I do not think you can avoid carrying that mes­sage,' Hakim added. 'This is true eastern mar­tial art: corner the enemy, and leave him nothing. Your Machiavelli understood.'

From the other room came Guerrero's call: 'Coverage, Hakim!'

The little man turned in his chair, picked up the severed ear, and released the tube which lay nearly invisible against the bag. In three strides he was through the door, to loom at Guerrero's side.

The item was insignificant, merely an admis­sion that an NBN star was a possible kidnap victim. Television was carrying the news, but obviously was not going to dwell on the event. 'So, I must contact another medium,' Hakim said, and held up his ghastly trophy.

Guerrero blinked. 'You do what you do only too well, Hakim.'

'Praise, or criticism?'

'It is my mission to help you do all you possi­bly can.' Guerrero smiled at the sharp glance from Hakim; he had spoken the truth, yet not all of it. Nor could he boldly state what he knew about their second captive. It must seem a bril­liant suspicion. 'I have been studying Kenton very closely, Hakim,' he went on. 'I believe that his face is a masquerade. Either he or the come­dian might be persuaded to discuss the point.'

'The comedian?' Hakim barked a laugh. 'Not he; not now.'

Guerrero was very, very still. 'It has been quiet in there.'

'He no longer complains,' Hakim answered, deliberately vague.

'You are finished, then,' Guerrero persisted.

It was Hakim's pleasure to joke, thinking of the abject terror in the eyes of Charlie George. 'Say, rather, he is finished,' he rejoined, and turned back toward the torture room.

Guerrero followed unbidden, his excitement mounting, with only a glance toward Everett, whose hands were hidden in his lap. He saw Charlie George hanging inert like some butch­ered animal, his head half-obscured in glisten­ing red polymer. He could not know that Charlie had spent the past moments desperately inhal­ing, exhaling, trying with an animal's simplicity to bathe his lungs in precious oxygen. Charlie's mind was not clear but it held tenaciously to the fact that Guerrero was anxious for his death. Mouth and eyes open wide, Charlie George ceased to breathe as Guerrero came into view.

Guerrero's mistake was his haste to believe what he wanted to believe. He saw the plastic sucked against nostrils, the obscenely gaping mouth and staring eyes. He did not seek the thud of Charlie's heart under his twisted clothing and failed to notice the slender tube emergent from the plastic bag. 'The poor pendejo is dead, then?' He rapped the question out carelessly.

Hakim's mistake was the indirect lie, his au­tomatic response to questions asked in the tone Guerrero used now. 'Truly, as you see,' Hakim said, gesturing toward Charlie George, amused at Charlie's ploy.

Hakim's merriment was fleeting. From the tail of his eye he saw Guerrero's hand slide toward the Browning and, in that instant, Hakim resolved many small inconsistencies. Still, he flung the knife too hastily. Guerrero dodged, rolling as he aimed, but could not avoid the chair that struck him as he fired. The Iraqi sprang past the doorway, slammed the door and flicked the bolt in place as chunks of wallboard peppered his face. He had counted five shots from the Browning against the door lock, but knew the damned thing held many more. Half blinded by debris from Guerrero's fire, Hakim elected to run rather than retrieve his own sidearm. It lay at his media display in the path of Guerrero's contin­ued fire against the door. One slug hurled scat­tered fragments of his beloved Hewlett-Packard unit into the face of a video monitor.

Hakim reached his van quickly, almost forget­ting to snap the toggle he had hidden beneath the dash, and lurched toward the road with a dead-cold engine racing and spitting. He drop­ped low over the wheel, unable to see if Guerrero followed. Hakim had cash and the Uzi, an ex­quisite Israeli submachine gun, as Fat'ah emergency rations behind him in the van.

Hakim considered stopping to make a stand on the gravel road but checked his rearviews in time to reconsider. Guerrero was there, twenty seconds behind. Hakim would need ten to stop, ten more to reach and feed the weapon. He would fare better if he could increase his lead, and guessed that Guerrero would withhold fire as they passed through the village of Piru. It was worth a try.

Slowing at the edge of the little town, Hakim saw his rearviews fill with Guerrero^'s van. Whatever his motive, the Panamanian evidently had a hard contract to fulfill and might take insane chances, including a collision in public. Hakim wrenched the wheel hard, whirling through a market parking lot. A grizzled pickup truck avoided him by centimeters and stalled directly in Guerrero's path, and then Hakim was turning north, unable to see how much time he had gained.

The road steepened as Hakim learned from a road sign that Lake Piru and Blue Point lay ahead. He searched his rearviews but the road was too serpentine for clear observation, and Hakim began to scan every meter of roadside for possible cover.

He took the second possible turnoff, a rutted affair with warnings against trespassers, flanked by brush and high grass. The van threw up a momentary flag of dust, a small thing but suffi­cient for Guerrero who came thundering behind, alert for just such a possibility.

Hakim topped a low ridge and did not see Guerrero two turns back. Dropping toward a hol­low, he tried to spin the van but succeeded only in halting it broadside to the road. He hurtled from his bucket seat, threw open the toolbox, and withdrew the stockless Uzi with flashing precision. Two forty-round clips went into his jacket and then he was scrambling from the cargo door which thunked shut behind him. If Guerrero were near, let him assault the empty van while Hakim, on his flank, would cut him down from cover.

But he had not reached cover when the van of Bernal Guerrero appeared, daylight showing under all four tires as it crested the rise before the mighty whump of contact. Hakim stopped in the open, taking a splayed automatic-weapons stance, and fitted a clip in the Uzi.

Almost.

It may have been dirt from the jouncing ride, or a whisker of tempered steel projecting like a worrisome hangnail; whatever it was, it altered many futures.

Hakim dropped the clip and snatched at its twin, missed his footing, and sprawled in the dust. The van of Guerrero impended, crashing around Hakim's wheeled roadblock into the grassy verge, a great beast rushing upon him. Guerrero set the hand brake and exited running as Hakim, his weapon hoary with dirt, essayed a multiple side roll. He was mystified when Guer­rero merely kicked him in the head instead of triggering the automatic.

Hakim waited for death as he gazed into the murky nine-millimeter eye of the Browning. 'Daoudist,' he surmised bitterly.

'I am Fat'ah,' Guerrero mimicked, breathing deeply. His face shone with sweat and elation. 'And in Panama, a Torrijista, and everywhere, always, KGB.' The Soviet agent wiped dust from his mouth, the gun muzzle absolutely unwaver­ing and much too distant for a foot sweep by Hakim. 'Rise, turn, hands on your head.' Hakim obeyed.

Guerrero marched him back to his own van and forced him to lie prone in the pungent dust. While Guerrero ransacked the toolbox, Hakim listened for distant engines, voices, a siren. In the primeval mountain stillness he could even hear ticks from his cooling engine, but nothing remotely suggested deliverance.

Presently, standing above the little Iraqi, Guerrero ordered his hands crossed behind him. Hakim recognized his garrotte wire by its bite and was briefly thankful it was not about his neck. At further orders, Hakim stalked to Guer­rero's own vehicle and lay on his face beside it as he tried to identify a succession of odd sounds.

'Had you the wit to take a four-wheel-drive path,' Guerrero spoke pleasantly as he worked, 'you might have escaped. Since the day before yesterday my front differential housing has been full of transceiver gear.' Guerrero leaned into his van, arranged the controls, flicked the engine on and stood back. 'You wanted coverage, Hakim Arif? Well, turn and stand—and smile, you are live on Soviet television.'

The camera in Guerrero's hand looked very like a ballpoint pen but, unlike the unit he had left in the torture