Thunderstrike in Syria (10 page)

I walked to the center of the room, and that's when I saw the two other men lying on their backs on the straw-covered stone floor, in one corner of the room. I moved closer and looked down at them. Semiconscious, they wore only pants cut off at the thighs. Their bodies were discolored with blue, black and purple bruises and numerous cuts and sores, some of which were fairly recent; others were scabbed over. The eyes of one man were swollen shut and the left side of his face so distended that his own mother wouldn't have recognized him.

The room itself smelled like the deepest part of a cesspool and was a haven for vermin crawling over the walls and ceiling and through the straw. The only light came from four small windows, two on each side of the room, set high in the walls, windows that were only foot-square openings in the stone.

The men stared suspiciously at me. I myself wondered if they were part of some clever ploy of Karameh, all geared to trick me into revealing information. Every man had a full beard and hair that had not been cut in months; they had to be crawling with lice. Although the light was dim, I could make out two men with blond hair and definite Nordic-Alpine features.

During those few seconds as we stared at each other, screams of excruciating agony poured through the window. It seemed the terrorists had hoisted the man being tortured in the stork position, all the way off the ground. His arms, bound behind his back, had to support his full weight, which had to have dislocated his shoulders.

"Who are you?" I asked, assuming that the three men being tortured had been a part of this ragged group.

I saw that my use of English surprised the men; just the same, they continued to regard me with an animosity that grew by the seconds.

Staring defiantly at me, one of the men stood up and said in slightly accented English, "Go tell Karameh that sending you in here was a waste of time. We don't have any secrets to tell, and if we did, we wouldn't tell them."

Pressed for time and needing proof of who they were before I made an effort to get to Pierre, I said harshly in Arabic, "I am convinced that Allah is the syphilitic son of a whore."

Very often cultural instinct forces one to react faster than conscious, controlled thought. If the men were Moslem, rage should flicker briefly in their eyes before they caught themselves in realization of how I had tricked them with the filthy insult. But their eyes revealed only puzzlement, indicating that they had not understood what I had said. Rage was absent.

Evidently the man who was standing had understood, for he was actually smiling, as if amused. He turned and looked down at some of the others who were watching me with a mixture of contempt and bold disdain.

This stupid SLA nut thinks he can trick us by pretending to insult his precious Allah! I'd think Karameh would have more sense."

It was my turn to be mildly astonished. The man had spoken Hebrew. Before I could say anything, the man on his feet smiled mockingly at me and said in Arabic, "We agree with you. We think Allah is exactly what you said he is!"

Rapidly losing patience, I said in Hebrew, "If you're Israelis, how did you get here and why are you in such good physical condition? You look like pigs, but you don't look starved!"

The man in front of me stared, his mouth slack, his eyes uncertain. Five more of the men got to their feet, one of them, a tall man with a bitter face, looking intently at me but saying to the others in Hebrew. "Maybe he isn't an SLA agent?"

"None of you have answered my questions!" I said harshly. "I don't have time to play games. In less than an hour those sadists are going to make me wish I had never been born."

The man who had first gotten to his feet said with a trace of friendly earnestness. "My name is Josef Risenberg. We were in the Israeli armed forces but were captured by the SLA when we went into southern Lebanon a year ago. Originally there were thirty-one of us. Once in a while Karameh exchanges one of us for one of his rank and file members. That's why the SLA hasn't deprived us of food. You can't exchange dead men, and Karameh knows that if he starves us, our people at home will do the same to his men. But who are you?"

"I'm Nick Carter." I said. "How I got here is a tale too long to tell right now. Let's just say I'm the guy who's going to get us out of here, unless you prefer to stay here and rot in your own filth."

Some of the Israelis, still suspicious of me, glanced in silence at each other.

"You don't look like the Messiah to me. Carter! Risenberg was highly skeptical. "And that's who it would take to get us out of this rat-hole!"

"I'm not the Redeemer either, but I have a plan!"

"You're serious! You're really serious!" There was hope in Risenberg's voice, and his words were a kind of plea.

"What's behind the other two doors in the corridor in front?"

"The room on the north side is used for interrogation. That's where they tortured the two who are unconscious. We think they're with Israeli Intelligence. They have never said and we have never asked them. The door on the west end opens to a guard room. "His voice more excited, rang with hope. "If we could get inside that guard room, we'd have a chance. One wall is lined with assault rifles and machine guns."

"A chance!" another man said. "What are you talking about, Josef? "Where can we go? For God's sake, we're in the middle of hundreds of terrorists!"

The man got a reply from one of his fellow Israelis. "We'd be better off to die fighting, taking some of those psychopaths with us, than to live like this, to live worse than their dogs." The man got to his feet and stared at me. "I'm with you. Carter!"

"Listen, all of you," I said. "We do have a place to go — Jordan. There's a lot of armored stuff out there, including two Russian tanks. On the way over here, I saw shells being loaded into one tank. Once we're out of here, if we can get to those tanks, we can blow hell out of this camp, then get across the border into Jordan — at least in theory.

"We know about the tanks," Risenberg said. "For days the guards have been taunting us with how the SLA is going to attack a Jordanian village and leave behind evidence to point a finger at the PLO. That madman Karameh wants to create internal dissension among the Israeli haters. In this respect, I hope the son of a bitch is successful."

The man standing next to Risenberg looked at me as though I were stark raving mad. "But we can't get out of here! The guards always keep their guns trained on us whenever they enter. Besides, you're handcuffed."

"Tell me something I don't know!" I said. "I've less than forty-five minutes to get out of these bracelets before the guards come for me. If…"

"You've less time than that before the first group of guards come in," Risenberg cut in, looking at a shaft of light slanting through one of the windows on the north side. "The guards bring us the evening meal at five. Right now, it's about four-thirty."

"How do you know?"

"The way the light slants through the north-side windows. I developed the system to keep my mind active." He went over to the north side of the room, tapped a stone with the tip of his foot and looked at me. "This stone is five o'clock. See where the one column of sunlight ends, where it hits the floor? Right now, I'd say it's between four-thirty and four-forty. But it's like Jacob said, how are you going to get out of those cuffs?"

"Watch me!" I glanced at the door, then said to Risenberg. "Go over to the door and keep an eye on the corridor. If any guards pop out, let me know."

Mystified, Risenberg went over to the door and looked through the tiny square opening. The rest of the Israelis stared at me. I went to work. I wriggled my cuffed hands underneath my shirt, squirming them past my belt, inside my pants and shorts until they reached my genitals. With a slight grunt, I yanked the small, slender tube taped behind my scrotum and slid it into my fingers. Hurriedly, I inched my hands upward and back outside my pants, holding the tube that contained Pierre tightly.

The Israelis, grouped around me, watched with fascination and amazement.

"Can we help?" one of them asked.

"No, I must do it," I said. Actually there wasn't anything they could have done, even if it hadn't been for deadly little Pierre, so small he was only one-third the size of a marble. It wasn't his size but what he contained that made him so extremely dangerous — hydro-chlorsarsomasine, a nerve gas that killed faster than pure hydrocyanic acid. Anyhow, I could work faster by touch alone than by taking time to tell the men what to do.

I placed the section of the tube containing Pierre on the floor, retaining the other half in my left hand. With the thumb and forefinger of my other hand, I tilted the tube and reached for the lock picks inside, hoping desperately that my fingers wouldn't be too numb to do the job. I selected a Number Six lock pick and began working on the left cuff.

Several minutes later, the handcuffs were on the floor and my wrists were free. I quickly screwed the tube together again, and dropped it into my pocket. I looked over at Risenberg, who nodded slowly, telling me that none of the guards were in sight.

"All right, Carter. So you're free," a man said in a low voice. "But we're still a long way from getting out of here. By the way, my name is Cham Elovitz."

The other young men introduced themselves — Benjamin Sahl, John Ivinmetz, Lev Wymann… and other names, all Jewish. I assumed that the two blonds, Karl Nierman and Jacob Keifer, had been immigrants from West Germany to Israel.

"Each time the guards come in they're heavily armed," Lev Wymann said, "and they watch to make sure we don't try anything."

"They might not feed us tonight until after they take Carter out," Benjamin Sahl offered.

"What's the procedure when they bring you food?" I asked. "Do they make you line up against the wall or take some other kind of precautionary measure?"

"Four of them come in," Sahl said. "Two guards and two other men. One man carries the pot or a sack. The other guy has tin plates and spoons. The two guards stand by the door while the other two pass out the slop. Grabbing for the gun-carrying guards would be impossible.

"That's right," sighed Karl Nierman, "and they're not going to be any less careful tonight."

"How far inside the door do the guards stand?" I asked.

"Six, seven… maybe eight feet," Nierman replied. "It depends where we're sitting when they come in. What's the difference? They have guns. We're still at a disadvantage."

I looked at the handcuffs in my right hand. "We have one advantage. They believe I'm cuffed. I'll tell you how we'll do it. Eight of you sit against the east wall. Sahl, you and I and Risenberg will sit by the south wall, near the center. Do any of you have training in karate?"

Sahl Soloman chuckled. "Sure, we know Gobat, the Israeli version of karate. It's a blending of all the oriental variants."

"Let's get into position," I said. Ben Sahl and I hurried to the south wall. The other Israelis moved to the east side of the room and sat down. Sitting toward the center of the wall, I put one cuff around my right wrist and pushed the prong slightly into the locking section, making sure that the prong's first notch did not move past the lock catch. Putting my hands behind my back, I used the same method on my left wrist. All I had to do was move my hands slightly and the cuffs would fall off.

With Sahl sitting to my right and Risenberg watching through the small opening of the door, the ten Israelis and I waited.

Five o'clock came.

The guards did not bring the evening meal.

I watched the end of the one shaft of light as it moved ever so very slowly to the southeast corner of the room. I judged it was about five-thirty when we heard the door to the outside open. Risenberg didn't have to tell us that the guards were entering the building. A strained, anxious look on his face, he hurried over to me and Sahl and sat down to my left.

Moments later, we heard the iron bar being removed from across the door to the prison room. Then the door was pulled open and five Arabs stormed into the room, two carrying AK-47 assault rifles slung across their shoulders, the other three holding Russian PPsH submachine guns. From where we sat, Risenberg, Sahl and I could see a sixth Arab waiting out in the corridor. He was holding a 9mm UZI submachine gun. Much to our chagrin, we saw that several other Arabs were standing in the open door of the guard room, at the west end of the corridor, and were smirking.

I stood up, afraid that if I waited to let the guards jerk me to my feet the handcuffs would fall off. Two of them advanced, one saying in a loud voice, "This time, you offspring of a pig, you will tell
al-Huriya
what he wants to know, or we'll begin by breaking your fingers one by one."

When the two Arabs closest to me reached for my arms, I decided it was now or never. I flicked my wrists, the handcuffs dropped to the floor and my arms streaked upward and out with such speed that the Arabs had no chance to defend themselves. Using Karate as we planned, I bunched the fingers of my left hand into a
Nukite
spear, stabbing into the neck of one guard. It felt as thought I was slicing through a hardening mush; yet I knew in that instant that I had hit the target and that the Arab was only seconds away from oblivion.

I hadn't missed the Arab to my right either, my
Shuto
sword-hand chop smashing into his throat. He gagged in agony, dropped the machine gun as his wind pipe started to swell shut, and began to sink to the floor.

Simultaneously, Sahl employed a top of the foot
Kogan geri
kick to wreck the sex department of one of the guards in front of me and Risenberg gave the fourth terrorist a lightning quick side-thrust kick to the belly and grabbing the man's PPsH machine gun with both hands.

The fifth guard leaped forward to crack open the side of Risenberg's head with the barrel of his PPsH. I made a mess of his plan by seizing the weapon with both hands and, as I twisted the barrel toward the ceiling, kneeing him in the groin as hard as I could. As I had anticipated, the explosion of pain made him release the sub-gun which I let fall to the floor. I slammed him across the side of the head with my right hand, then grabbed his shirt front with my left hand, slid my right hand between his legs, lifted him up and pitched him head-on into the sixth guard who was charging through the door. The unconscious body of the man I had laid out crashed into the big Arab, who let out a yell of rage and fell backward through the door, the weight of the other man forcing him to the floor, and startling the two men who had been in the doorway of the guardroom.