"The Iranian Hit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pendleton Don)

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The mission was not supposed to be a complicated one. Nor an easy one, no. Not easy by any stretch of the imagination. But cut and dried, just the same.

Brognola had briefed Bolan only ninety minutes earlier. Bolan could still hear the cigar-chewing head fed's words.

quot;The man's name is General Eshan Nazarour,quot; Brognola had told him. quot;An Iranian. High ranker in SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, until the revolution came along. The general lost both legs in a mortar attack on SAVAK headquarters during the final days of fighting, but he still managed to get out alive, which a lot of 'em didn't. For the last nine months, he's been lodged incognito on a forty-acre spread up in Potomac. He's got influential ties with plenty of big money in this town, and some of that money has been putting him up. But legs or no legs, the guy's a mobster, plain and simple, and the administration doesn't want anything to do with him.

quot;His visa expires at midnight tonight. He's sticking it out until the last minute, hoping his lawyers will be able to pull some strings — which they can't. The kicker is that we learned today that Nazarour has been marked for death by an Iranian assassination squad. At any time from now on. Any time today or tonight.

quot;Now we all know what it's like to have a foreign hit team prowling the country. It makes people edgy, right? But this time around we have hard data on the bastards and we're going to get them.

quot;The squad is a fourteen-man paramilitary commando unit — the best they've got — and they've been on his trail ever since January '79, when Khomeini's government took power. During the first week of trials, Nazarour was sentenced in absentia to death, on charges of torture, massacre of people, treason, and earthly corruption, and our intel says he's guilty as sin of those charges and a whole lot more. So this hit team wants him bad.

quot;I don't know how they tagged him here, but our spook in Tehran reports that they picked up his scent the day before yesterday. The agent gathered the intel after the team had already been dispatched from Tehran — they left within two hours after learning of the general's whereabouts. They've probably been in D.C. most of today, reconnoitering and setting up the operation.

quot;This won't be their first hit, either. The team is led by a man named Karim Yazid, who made quite a bloody rep for himself with the Cherikhaye Fedaye Khalq— People's Sacrifice Guerillas — in Iran before the revolution. The group was trained by Libyan military personnel, financed by a radical Palestinian group, and was the toughest in the Mideast. Yazid drew from the Cherikhaye Fedaye Khalq when he put his present outfit together.

quot;So far, they've racked up a total of thirty kills in the past three years of Khomeini enemies around the world. Four in the Mideast, ten in Europe and sixteen — count 'em, sixteen — here in America. That's what's got the CIA and the other agencies asking us for help. We've advised Nazarour of our intel, and he's gone stone hard. He's been paranoid as hell the whole time he's been here, and I got the feeling after talking to him on the phone that he suspects this of being some sort of American trick.

quot;He's refused to allow any of our troops or security personnel onto the grounds. But he has agreed to allow Colonel John Phoenix to act in an advisory capacity to his own security staff.

quot;As I say, he has his suspicions, but he's not taking any chances in case our information is on the level. He's aware of this hit team, of course, and fully appreciates their capabilities. He's being guarded by a private security agency provided by one of these big-money friends of his, but he must know that better security than he's got hasn't kept Yazid's outfit from hitting effectively in the past. And he certainly knows that his 'protection' wouldn't stand a chance against this team in the dark.

quot;So he's refused to budge from the grounds of that estate until dawn. Which is fine with us. Striker, that hit team must attack tonight. Either at the place in Potomac or just after dawn, en route to the private airstrip in Rockville where Nazarour is planning to catch a plane out of the country. If they don't hit tonight, they run the risk of having the general slip through their fingers and disappear again, as he's done a few times in the past.

quot;So that's your mission. These assassinations have got to stop. All sorts of Third World hoodlums are starting to think they can march into this country and turn it into a shooting gallery whenever they please.

quot;When that hit team does launch their attack tonight, you'll be there to take them on. Sure, no one would cry if they did hit Nazarour, but the guy is excellent bait, and it's just too good a setup to pass by. The odds are stacked, but with Nazarour refusing to let us onto the grounds to protect him in force... well, your name is the only one in the hat, buddy. When that attack comes, do what you can. It's up to you. The top man says hit teams call for Phoenix.quot;

It was quite a speech. Brognola had spoken those words that afternoon, only hours after a bone-weary Bolan had arrived back at Stony Man from Minnesota. That mission had sapped him to his very soul — mentally, physically, and emotionally. And now it was to be Potomac, Maryland.

There had been time to requisition the necessary ordnance, time for a change into night clothes, time to pick up the cassette with additional background on the mission, to be absorbed on the drive to Potomac. And time to be gone.

There had not been time for any personal words with Brognola or with April, that bright-eyed lovely with the genius IQ, who was both quot;wardenquot; of Stony Man Farm and the most important lady in Bolan's life.

During Hal's briefing, Bolan could tell that April, sitting on the sidelines, had things she wanted to tell him. Important things, like how glad she was to see her man back from Minnesota in one piece. Bolan could read that much from those brown eyes, which could express so much without words. But those eyes also said that she understood that the mission came first. The mission always came first. April was, yeah, that kind of special lady. She would tell Bolan the important things — the man/woman things that existed only for the two of them — when she saw him again.

Bolan hadn't had time to listen to the full tape that Stony Man's computer wizard, Aaron quot;The Bearquot; Kurtzman, had compiled from the general's dossier, but he digested the particulars. And he didn't like any of them.

Bolan knew that since the revolution, Washington had welcomed any number of the Shah's regime into the country, especially those interested in someday restoring some kind of sanity to a homeland being systematically driven back into the Dark Ages by a religious madman.

But Nazarour did not fall into this category. The man was as self-serving as he was ruthless, with nothing save his own shadowy interests at heart. Bolan understood that the Shah's rule had been far less than perfect, and Nazarour epitomized the corruption that had been one of the regime's continuing problems. A man with untold millions pillaged from his years as a top-echelon officer in what the Shah's military had perverted into one of the most dread secret police agencies in the world. Yeah, that was Eshan Nazarour. The man sounded like Savage incarnate.

But whatever else the general was, he would indeed be perfect bait for the trap Bolan hoped to spring when Karim Yazid's hit team came calling.

The world was growing smaller in many ways. There were fewer and fewer places where men could gather and talk of freedom and peace and plans for a better future without yesterday's mistakes. America was one of those places, and it had to remain so. If not for Eshan Nazarour, then for his countrymen who were more honorable than he, who cared about their Iran and dreamed and, yes, plotted for a day when freedom — real freedom — would ring in that torn land.

And not just the Iranian exiles, but those from Afghanistan and anywhere else in the world where the flame of freedom had been extinguished. These men, good and true, had to be reassured that America was safe and open to them. That their dreams and plans for a better world could be nurtured in safety. That they could seek asylum here from those merchants of terror and violence who saw fit to ignore all conventions and rules of diplomacy or morality.

No, Bolan had no love for cannibals of Nazarour's type. Bolan was glad the guy was getting booted out of the country on his tail. He deserved no less. But if protecting Eshan Nazarour for the coming few hours and protecting the values and rights that made this country great were one and the same thing, then, yes, Bolan was ready to take on whatever the Iranian hit force could throw at him, and return it in kind.

There was far more at stake here than the life of one corrupt ex-military man.

Bolan had been thinking about that as he'd approached Nazarour's temporary residence in Potomac.

That was when he spotted the woman.

That was when the complications began....