'We tumbled to it thanks to our tap on the Russian Embassy in Tripoli.'
'I thought Khaddafi was in Moscow's pocket.'
'He was and still is, for the time being,' said Lansdale. 'But that old boy's been getting mighty uppity lately and the Kremlin's looking for a new puppet hereabouts. Shahkhia seems to be it. We've only been onto this since
'The conversation we picked up over the embassy line indicates that the Russians are giving Shahkhia the necessary backing and that the coup is set to happen immediately. Shahkhia spoke like someone with a wide base of Libyan support too. Most likely in the military. Considering the timing of Jericho's operation, and Jericho's intense hatred for Khaddafi, I'd say Shahkhia is our best bet as the buyer for whatever Jericho has diverted over here.'
'Is Jericho at the villa now?' Bolan's reaction was biased toward action. Enough talk.
'We don't know, Colonel Phoenix. My guess is that the cargo itself is in the possession of this Kennedy guy, the mercenary. His force probably
'What kind of force does Kennedy have?'
'Paramilitary all the way,' said the Company man. 'U.S. mercs, mostly. We've not been able to get an accurate manpower count. We do know there have been three or four civilian. Huey choppers inside the estate walls of that villa at one time or another recently.'
'What happens to the real Mike Rideout?' asked Bolan.
'He'll still be home by the end of the week, just like Jericho's people told him he would,' smiled Lansdale.
'One more thing,' grunted Bolan. 'I must locate a woman, an agent from Puerto Rico, who Jericho is holding prisoner. She's here in Libya with him. Her name is Eve Aguilar.'
'Nothing on that, I'm afraid,' said Lansdale in his languorous, East Coast prep-school style. 'The most I can tell you is that Shahkhia is rumored to have a taste for Western women. Maybe Jericho has something in mind along those lines...'
The two men were only paces from the door. The meeting had come to an end.
'One last thing. I guess I should warn you about,' said Lansdale. 'It's something that's been coming through one of the other stations. But we're getting it only one piece at a time. The word is that the Israeli Mossad has already planted an agent of their own in the villa at Bishabia. No connection with us. You have been warned.'
Bolan smiled coldly.
'Name of the game,' he said, by way of a farewell.
Bolan left the covert complex to rejoin the Benghazi street scene outside. He had a phone call to make. To a man named Kennedy.
Yeah. Libya was definitely booming.
The Executioner was here to make sure it stayed that way.
But with a bigger boom, in the manner of Mack Bolan.
5
They sent a jeep into Benghazi to pick up Bolan at a designated corner in the busy waterfront district.
The jeep driver was a hefty American, outfitted in lightweight desert fatigues, who introduced himself as Doyle, then said no more for the duration of the forty-minute drive from Benghazi.
The adobe-type suburbs thinned out behind them. The jeep rocketed along a sparsely traveled blacktop highway that arrowed south into the rocky wilderness of desert.
The Sahara again.
The harsh wasteland of dunes stretched forever. The land shimmered with waves of heat beneath a bloodred sun. The wind blew in hot, scorching gusts. Thirst came quickly.
Bolan knew from experience that this was a deadly terrain of sand vipers, scorpions and clouds of loathsome flies. The only visible vegetation were the occasional stunted pines or thorny, knee-high shrubs.
It was startling, at one point, to see Arab tents and a flock of sheep and some camels amid this barren no-man's-land of sand and stone.
An arid land. But to Mack Bolan, a jungle nevertheless.
It was six o'clock.
A mere thirty hours since Mack Bolan's assault on Leonard Jericho's yacht, the
The oasis village of Bishabia was nothing more than a jumble of squalid stone houses and two main dirt streets.
But Leonard Jericho's villa, screened by desert trees beyond the village proper, was in a class by itself.
Doyle wheeled the jeep off the highway and along a winding approach to the front gate.
The walled estate was a blend of Roman and Moorish architecture. Bolan spotted clusters of cedar and aleppo pine trees growing near the outer base of the wall.
The entrance to the grounds was to the west. The concrete wall that surrounded the property was twenty feet high and six inches thick. An iron grille gate barred entrance.
The gate opened mechanically and the jeep passed through. Thus far things were so much easier than breaching Marker's damnable conglomeration in Algeria's Tanezrouft region of this same desert. Grim memories.
A brick gatehouse was situated just inside the wall. A guard, armed with a Galil ARM assault rifle, gave a sharp salute as the jeep rolled past.
Lansdale's intel had been correct. Jericho's security force was paramilitary all the way.
The wrought-iron gates closed automatically behind the jeep. Doyle and 'Rideout' drove a short distance into a spacious courtyard at the villa's core.
The core of Lenny Jericho's Something Big.
Three single-engine jet-turbine Bell UHi-D 'Huey' helicopters, buff-colored desert models without markings, rested on the pebbled turf of the courtyard. All three choppers were heavily armed, boasting 40mm cannons and 5.56mm miniguns mounted externally on turrets.
Three alert mercs stood guard around one of the aircraft. Other 'soldiers' lounged here and there at points around the courtyard, looking hot, oppressed, drenched in sweat.
Bolan made the scene even before the jeep had rolled to a stop. The heavily guarded copter would be carrying whatever cargo it was that Jericho's forces had lifted from the States. The other two Huey gun-ships would guard the cargo when word came down to rendezvous at a trade-off point with Jericho and Colonel Shahkhia.
The jeep stopped at the front of a flight of marble steps. The opulent-looking steps led up to the entrance of the villa itself.
A man stood waiting, hands on hips, halfway up the wide steps. He was dressed in lightweight fatigues. He had watched the jeep approach. When the vehicle halted, the guy came down the rest of the way with an almost arrogant stride.
This would be Kennedy. Blond-haired, boyish good looks did not fool Bolan. The guy's eyes told the story: the eyes of a killer.
Kennedy carried a 9mm Browning hi-power in a cross-draw position at his left hip. Like those mercs Bolan could see who were not toting Galils, Kennedy also carried a Largo-Star submachine gun strapped over his shoulder.
Bolan knew the Largo as a Spanish copy of the German MP-40, or 'Schmeisser.' The weapon, referred to by Konzaki back at Stony Man Farm as the Z-45, is fully automatic with a cyclic rate of fire of 550 rounds per minute and a muzzle velocity of some 1,500 fps. Hot stuff.
Kennedy looked at Doyle as Bolan climbed from the jeep.
'Was he wired?'
