Beirut Payback: MacK Bolan by Don Pendleton

die."
    * * *
    "Sir, the call you've been waiting for is on the field phone." Yakov Katzenelenbogen nodded and grabbed the phone's receiver.
    Katz was certain the caller would be Mack Bolan. It would be the first time they made contact since the Phoenix Force leader and the Executioner had parted ways along the Israel-Lebanon border hours earlier. At that time, Bolan had been on his way to meet Yakov's nephew, Chaim.
    This call would be from Bolan's miniature transceiver, boosted and scrambled by several Israeli stations until relayed through the wires to this communications tent on the Israeli army base at Acre.
    Katz had expected to hear from Bolan well before this and had tried to ignore the worry that plagued him. The thirty thousand Israeli troops had been massed along the border with good reason.
    Things were going to hell in a hand basket in Lebanon.
    The first light of day warmed comfortably, but Katz felt cold inside.
    "Go," he growled curtly into the field phone receiver.
    "Mack here." Katz casually turned away from the others in the communications tent and pitched his voice low.
    "What have you got, Striker?"
    "Bad news, Yakov. Chaim is dead." The Israeli's throat constricted.
    "How? Strakhov?"
    "No. Chaim got hit in a cross fire between Druse and Phalangists."
    "The woman, Zoraya?" Katz kept his voice hard. The senior member of Phoenix Force had been losing members of his family to violence since World War II, leaving him to carry the pain. He had almost gotten used to it.
    Almost.
    "I had Zoraya and I lost her," Bolan replied.
    "Then you've got her again. She contacted Chaim's control officer in Beirut not ten minutes ago. He got the message to me and I got back to her. She... said nothing about Chaim. "
    "She probably didn't know how to. I know how she felt. What did she say?"
    "That you must contact her." Katz gave Bolan the address in Beirut that Zoraya had given him. "She wouldn't stay on. Chaim's control can't get to her. You must know how the situation is there. He's unable to move anywhere."
    "I'll get to her," Bolan promised.
    "And your target?"
    "Still at large. I had him under the gun, but I gave him a white flag without him knowing it. The enemy is on our side of the street this once. For a few hours, anyway. There's a plot to hit the Lebanese president, but Moscow thinks it's the wrong time. They've sent our man to straighten it out."
    "Any leads?"
    "The Disciples of Allah."
    "The ones who..."
    "Right. Only the bunch I found tonight won't be massacring any more Marines or anyone else." Katz started to ask what Bolan intended to do next when he noticed three men strutting toward him with grim determination: the commander of this Israeli detachment and two men in American civilian apparel whom Katz read as CIA.
    He lowered his voice even more and spoke rapidly into the mouthpiece.
    "Trouble, Mack. I'm about to be arrested and interrogated, if I read this right. Uh, if I allow it, that is. How do I play it?" Katz had only seconds before the three men reached him. They would not buy his beret-topped professorial air but would know exactly how dangerous he was. All three of them carried pistols. What they did not, could not, know was that Katz already had them under the gun.
    The one-armed ex-Mossad boss wore a prosthetic device attached to the stump of his right arm. This "hand," a state-of-the-art contraption of steel, insulated wires and cables with four fingers and a thumb, was not as practical or versatile as the threepronged hook Katz favored.
    But the device featured an "index finger" that was in fact the barrel of a built-in, single-shot pistol that fired a .22 Magnum cartridge. The bullet was detonated by a nine-volt battery that could be activated by manipulation of the muscles in the stump of Katz's arm. There was a safety catch at the palm of the artificial hand to prevent firing the gun by accident.
    Katz computed the odds of grabbing his holstered pistol while two of these men recovered if he