Hellfire Crusade by Don Pendleton

Arabs.
    "And a head cloth? What do they call them — a ghutra?" asked Bolan. "Looks like that young man is wearing jeans and a sport shirt or something just as casual."
    It was the end of Kurtzman's transmission. The Bear waited on the line, knowing that Bolan was silently making a final assessment.
    After a few moments the man in black said simply, "We're going in."
    "Right," Danny backed him up.
    "Two last things I need from you," Bolan told the Bear. "All the material you've compiled, especially the satellite shots... I want them on one tape. And I want you to call Steve Hohenadel and tell him that everything's on as we arranged." Bolan had already held a long-distance conference with Hohenadel and his partner, Chris Sorbara, in East Africa. They were the ace bush pilots who had flown Bolan and Phoenix Force on their mission to Blood River. The Executioner knew he could trust them.
    "What about Grimaldi?" asked Kurtzman.
    "I'll call him myself."
    It was the next thing Bolan did — and Jack Grimaldi was waiting.

6
    "It's a go!" instructed Bolan.
    "I'm taking her off auto," warned Grimaldi, glancing back over his shoulder to where Bolan stood hunched over near the cockpit entrance. "There could be some turbulence up ahead. Better warn Danny."
    Bolan returned to the cabin. Danica Jones sat glued to the window, just as she had for the past two hours. She appeared excited, which brought out a schoolgirl excitement in her. Bolan liked her fresh-faced enthusiasm.
    She seemed even more vital, more alive inside, than she had in the suffocating confines of her retreat at Westfield. There was an edge of anticipated danger, the keen thrill of being tested against long odds, as they headed into action. All three of them shared and savored the same stimulation.
    "Nearly there?" asked Danny.
    "Soon," Bolan told her. "But Jack says we could be in for a few bumps."
    Danny did not have to be told to fasten her safety belt, then she resumed her watch through the porthole.
    The vast and block of Arabia, hostile and uninviting, stretched from the foam-flecked shoreline to the horizon. Here the earth's crust lay bare, without the slightest shade of trees or the cool refreshment of streams and takes, but parched, crumpled and forbidding.
    It was also starkly beautiful in its own primeval way. The checkerboard politics of the Middle East had forced Grimaldi to plot a zigzag course, skipping this way and that like a drunken frog.
    The cover story over the airwaves was that they were a special team on their way to put out an oil blaze in Oman.
    Jack Grimaldi nursed the big cargo clipper through the turbulence. He had fought alongside the Executioner in this part of the world before — in the big blitzer's recent war against the Muslim Madman. The veteran pilot wore a mirthless grin as he adjusted the trim; after all, Ayatollah Khomeini was only one of the cannibal contenders for that dubious title.
    Grimaldi was a crack pilot, able to fly almost anything. His Italian good looks attracted women by the score. Bolan liked the guy. In common, they had distinguished service records and an enduring hatred for the Mafia. The Stony Man flying ace had worked backup for the universal soldier on more missions than he could remember.
    They were a good team. Back home Bolan had filled him in on a need-to-know basis, but Grimaldi was already well briefed in this mission; what mattered was that Mack was trying to pull someone out of Khurabi.
    They had pored over the maps together looking for a possible landing site — an improvised and most definitely unauthorized airstrip for a sudden retrieval op. But not a single square inch of Khurabi's rugged terrain looked in the least bit suitable, even for emergency use. The pilot had suggested that the only paved road in the interior, which served the oil fields along the northwestern edge of the country, might serve their purpose. Bolan turned down the suggestion; they had to stick much closer to the opposite