They passed a haphazard pile of four entangled bodies. PLO. Ropes had been tied around the dead men's necks, the heads almost torn loose from the bodies.

"Dragged behind trucks," Herzi explained as they continued past. "No one takes prisoners here." Bolan lifted a hand to silence the Israeli and Herzi got the message.

Both men fell farther away from the road.

An army tank rumbled into sight from behind a row of two-story, battle-scarred buildings. The war machine clanked by, never slowing as it passed the spot where Bolan and the Mossad man took to cover.

"On their way to investigate our firefight," Bolan noted.

"They will find nothing but dead Muslims, which is what they want to find," whispered Herzi. "The Fiat cannot be traced."

"How far are we from Zoraya's apartment?"

"Quite frankly, considering the situation in Beirut tonight, we could probably get there on foot in the same amount of time it would take to drive. There is heavy fighting between here and where she lives."

"All the better to be on foot then," Bolan remarked. He looked in the direction of the Lebanese army tank that had been swallowed by the night.

"Let's move out. They'll be back when they find out there's nothing over there to shoot at." They left their cover and continued on, cutting across an alley.

Automatic weapons stammered in the distance two or three blocks away. Bolan heard people screaming.

"The soldiers are not our main concern," Herzi warned. "The Maronite Phalangist militia... they will shoot at anything that moves."

Bolan knew of the Phalangists, the radical military arm of a powerful political party in Lebanon.

It had been Phalangist militiamen who slaughtered those hundreds of unarmed Palestinian refugees following the assassination of a Lebanese president a couple of years back.

Herzi led Bolan from one deserted back dirt alley to another, moving ever deeper into Beirut, toward the worst of the devastation.