Bolan fired a cigarette. He had hoped that Thatcher would have the best clue to the whereabouts of Eve Aguilar. But that hope was now dead, like the general himself.

"Tell me about Rideout," said Bolan. "What did you learn from him?"

"Ah, truth serum, it's wonderful stuff," said Lansdale. "Jericho owns a villa forty miles southeast of here in Bishabia. Rideout says that's where he was headed. He was supposed to contact the villa when he landed in Benghazi."

"That was this morning?"

"Yes. Rideout told us that a mercenary named Kennedy is honchoing the operation at the villa. They'll want to know why you're late. But air travel is notorious in these parts, and you can build a story around that."

"Does Rideout have any idea what Jericho's operation is all about?"

"Negative. He was told stateside that Jericho Industries needs a temporary security force for one of their Libyan business concerns. That's all he knows except that they told him he'd be back home by the end of the week."

Bolan tried to fit what he was hearing into the puzzle.

"So we've got a paid-off general in the States and a covert security force here in Libya," he said. "I think that Jericho has been supplied by Thatcher with something big, has had it transported here, and now he needs his own force to safeguard it. But if Khaddafi is Jericho's buyer, why does Jericho need a civilian outfit with people like Rideout? Why aren't Khaddafi's own forces taking over security?"

Lansdale answered immediately, but there was something of a weariness in his young man's voice.

"Khaddafi is not Jericho's buyer. There is bad blood between Jericho and Khaddafi. Remember when Reagan cut off Libyan oil imports to the U.S.? Khaddafi went through the roof. He instigated reprisals at the time against most American interests in Libya. These reprisals never made the world media for a variety of reasons. We still don't know everything that happened. But the Libyan government shut down several U.S. business concerns here, including several that were clearing big profits for Jericho. Three of Jericho's top men in Libya disappeared in the middle of the night and were never heard from again. That was Khaddafi's work and Jericho knows and resents it."

The agent flipped open a folder on his desk and handed a 12x13-inch glossy photograph across to Bolan.

"Here is the man we're fairly certain Jericho is doing business with. Colonel Ahmad Shahkhia. Shahkhia and Khaddafi have been close friends since childhood. Shahkhia is second-in-command, under Khaddafi, of the Libyan army."

Bolan studied the Arab face in the picture. The photo had evidently been snapped without the colonel's knowledge. Shahkhia was in uniform, sipping from a cup at a sidewalk cafe. Even from a photograph, in repose, the military commander emanated an aura of forceful ambition. Bolan memorized the face and handed the picture back to Lansdale.

"A coup?"

Lansdale nodded.

"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 last night.

"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 is at the villa in Bishabia. Meanwhile Jericho is off somewhere making the final negotiations with Shahkhia, or Shahkhia's people."

"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 Traveler, on the other side of the world in Exuma Cay in the Bahamas.

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.