"There is only one way to live," came the reply.

The code exchanged, Bolan holstered Big Thunder. He tugged open the driver's door.

"Glad you made it, Captain. Slide over, please. I'll take the wheel." The civvies-clad contact clambered into the passenger seat, not releasing the Uzi submachine gun cradled in his lap, his right finger resting on the trigger below the car's window level.

"My apologies for being late. I was slowed by a Lebanese checkpoint that had gone up since yesterday."

Bolan climbed in, kicked the Fiat to life and pulled a hard U-turn, gunning the vehicle back toward the city.

"Will the checkpoint give us trouble on the way in?"

"There are many ways into Beirut, and I know them all," grunted the Israeli. "We stand a fifty-fifty chance of getting in without trouble. Those are good odds on a night like this."

The guy's rough-hewn features reminded Bolan of someone he knew well.

This Mossad man, Chaim Herzi, was a nephew of Yakov Katzenelenbogen, the former Israeli intelligence boss who now headed a covert U.S. antiterrorist combat unit called Phoenix Force, which until recently had been under Bolan's command. Captain Herzi looked like the spitting image of a younger Katz.

The Fiat jolted along with less speed than Bolan would have liked, the single headlight pointing the way past occasional deserted-looking clay houses and nothing else. Scars of mortar shells pockmarked the road and countryside.

The two men encountered no military traffic and none of the sporadic fighting that peppered the night, only a few vehicles and pedestrians heading the other way, refugees from the holocaust. The thunder and lightning of war grew fierce as the Fiat drew closer to the city. Flares arced into the sky and cast night into surreal day two miles ahead.

"It is difficult to believe," commented the Israeli, "that Beirut was not long ago regarded as the Paris of the Mediterranean."