Thunderstrike in Syria (7 page)

Slowly and carefully I drove the van down the wadi, now and then thinking of how easy it would be for an enemy on the slopes to ambush us, either with a sub-gun or a well-aimed grenade. The hell with it; risk was part of the business. Anyhow, this was still better than going sheeplike through life listening to your arteries become brittle.

At length Miriam said, "Do you see where the river bed curves up ahead? Just beyond the bend you'll see an old rusted jeep. Stop there."

"What's a jeep doing there?"

She must have detected a note of suspicion in my voice, for she replied half-angrily, "How should I know? It's been there for as long as I can remember. Someone drove it up there years ago and the motor quit. How else could it have gotten there?"

I edged the van forward, ignoring the sweat running down my face, and tried to calculate how far we were from the Syrian-Jordanian border. But it was impossible to know the exact distance; there had been too many twists and turns. I estimated that we had about twenty miles to go. I also sensed that Miriam was giving me quick sideway glances.

I said, "Is this the route you always used when you visited the camp?"

"Several times," she said. "Other times we used the shorter route. Several miles from here, to the north, there's a road that leads up onto the high part where the camp is."

"Are you saying that the route we're on is seldom used?"

"Almost never, as far as I know. The SLA uses the other road."

"Then why did you use this route those other times?" I gave her a brief glance and saw resentment flashing in her eyes.

"So that's it! You don't trust me!" she said angrily. "That's why you're asking me all these questions. Damn you! I don't have to answer them!"

"Then don't blame me for having doubts! I snapped and speeded up over a stretch of sunbaked clay. "You and your brother are double agents. To me that means it's a toss-up whether you're double-crossing AXE or the SLA!"

Detecting that Miriam was not only infuriated but taken aback by my bluntness, I slowed the van when we came to the beginning of the bend in the riverbed.

"It just so happens that a landslide blocked the other road," she said, obviously trying to control her voice. "It took months to clear the rocks; all the work had to be done by hand. It was during that time that we used this route."

I still wasn't convinced, but I said, "You should have told me that in the first place, even if you can't prove it."

"And since we're having this little chat," she went on, "I know that 'Joseph Allen Galloway' is a cover name. You're Nick Carter! Now tell me I'm wrong!"

I merely chuckled and kept my eyes straight ahead. "What makes you think I'm Nick Carter, whoever he might be?"

"Come off it, Nick," she half-sneered. "For a mission of this magnitude, AXE would send only the best. And it's common knowledge in certain circles that one Nick Carter is the best AXE has to offer. Conclusion: You have to be Nick Carter."

A nod to a blind man is as good as a wink. If I neither confirmed nor denied my identity, she would still have to have a one percent element of doubt, not that it made a damn bit of difference at this stage of the game.

"You can call me by any name you want," I said. "My only interest is in getting to the top of one of the walls and pinpointing the location of the Hawk's camp."

"There's the jeep up ahead," she said, "right where I said it would be. And just in case you're wondering how I know the way to the top, I climbed the left face with Ahmed once while we were out here looking for ancient artifacts. Of course, you don't believe me."

I ignored the nails in her voice, which may have been the reason she added, "Well, do you or don't you?"

"Whether I do or don't" — and I had my doubts — "we're here," I said, trying to sound cheerful.

I parked the van to the right of the jeep which sat on its wheel-rims, the rims buried in the hard clay. The tires had rotted long ago, and the water had washed away the rubber. Wind had sandblasted away the paint and the jeep was caked with reddish rust. Of World War II vintage, the wreck looked not only pathetic but ridiculous. It was something that was but shouldn't be.

Miriam pointed to the right. "Over there," she said. "We can climb to the top over there. That's the way Ahmed and I went. It was only a few months ago."

"I'll get the stuff," I said, putting on my shirt. I went to the rear, strapped on a Luger waist holster, shoved Wilhelmina into the oiled leather and closed the flap. I picked up the carry-all shoulder bag, containing the sextant, the celestial computer, the camera and other equipment, and slipped the strap over my shoulder. I next opened the gun locker and took out the AK-47, the Skorpion machine pistol and two shoulder bags of spare magazines for each weapon. On the other side of me, Miriam, who had opened another locker and had taken out two pairs of Zeiss binoculars, handed me one of the cases, a friendly smile on her sensuous mouth. I gave her the AK-47 assault rifle and the bag filled with spare clips.

She smiled again. "Let's not forget the canteens."

A few minutes later, we were outside the van and headed for the left-side face, Miriam leading the way to a very tiny gully in the slope that was almost perpendicular, a depression only slightly larger than a fifteen-foot wide ditch.

"We'll have to be very careful," Miriam said when we reached the face. "As you can see, there are numerous hand-holds, and the side is not all that steep. But if we grab a loose rock, or step on one, we could fall."

We looked up the face of the wall. To reach the top, we'd have to climb almost two hundred feet. The climb would indeed be dangerous, particularly since we had automatic weapons strapped to our backs and were weighed down with canvas shoulder bags.

The climb took us the better part of an hour, and by the time we pulled ourselves over the top edge, we were dripping sweat and Miriam was exhausted, although the climb had only been a good workout for me.

I saw at once that she had told the truth. The top of the cliff was nothing more than a small plateau filled with enormous granite and limestone boulders partially covered with chalky marl. Surprisingly there were stunted juniper trees growing among the boulders, amidst small bushes of
qat
, a narcotic plant that is chewed and has an effect similar to marijuana. But I didn't see any camp! To the south was the top of the other wadi wall and more hills. To the east, north and the west were hills and more hills of limestone and granite, many of which were crowned with bizarre shaped pinnacles of soft tufa stone. The openings of caves dotted the bases of many of the hills.

Miriam finished drinking from her canteen. "We've got to go six hundred feet or so to the northwest to see the base," she said. "I'll be ready in a minute."

She screwed the cap on the canteen, pushed back her wide-brimmed straw hat and wiped her forehead with a large silk handkerchief.

It didn't take us long, on the more-or-less level ground, to cover the distance to the edge of the plateau. Before we reached the end, Miriam, who was ten feet in front, motioned for me to get down. We crawled the rest of our way on our hands and knees, finally coming to the very edge and taking positions between two enormous boulders.

"There it is, Nick," Miriam said smugly, "the camp of Mohammed Bashir Karameh. I said I'd lead you to it and I have."

Through the binoculars I could see that the base was much larger than I had imagined, in spite of Miriam's having told me that there were usually three to four hundred men and women at the camp, ninety-nine percent of them terrorists.

I studied the layout, noting each feature. In the center of the camp were the remains of the Tower of Lions. But it wasn't a tower. It was an immense square building of stone, without any roof and with only three stories remaining, half of the south wall in ruins. To the northeast of the tower was a long, low building also built of stone, all of it underneath camouflaged netting. Miriam told me that it was used as a storehouse.

To the southwest were scores of small, mud-built and windowless huts, each with a small opening to permit smoke to escape. Scattered in between and around the huts were tents made of woven black goat fleece, each tent supported by poles that varied in length so that both the top and the side walls sloped. I could see people moving around the tents and the houses, but the distance was too great to see their faces clearly.

What surprised me the most were the vehicles parked side by side underneath a tremendous scattered-leaf pattern netting supported by high poles. Two jeeplike command cars, six L-59 Gronshiv armored cars, a dozen personnel carriers, three of which were half-tracks and also Russian, and two T-54 tanks with 140-millimeter cannons!

I didn't lower the binoculars as I asked Miriam why she hadn't mentioned the armor.

"You didn't ask me!" she said indignantly. "What's the difference? There they are."

"I'm not blind," I snapped. "I'm only wondering why all that heavy stuff is down there."

"I don't know," Miriam shrugged. "You'll have to ask
al-Huriya,
or one of his aides. Khalil Marras for example."

Suspecting that she was mocking me, I shoved the binoculars into their case, gave her a dirty look and crawled to the rear of the boulder, to the side that could not be seen from the SLA camp below. Miriam crawled to the back of the opposite boulder, a smile on her face. Or was it a smirk?

Down on one knee, I took off the two shoulder bags, opened one and removed the camera and the collapsible tripod. Thirty feet across from me, Miriam took off her sunglasses, lit a cigarette and lazily blew smoke in my direction.

I was about to take the tripod and camera and return to the edge when I caught a brief glimpse of a man, who had reared up from behind a boulder twenty feet to my rear, but had not ducked down fast enough. In that split second, I realized that it was too much of a coincidence for one of the SLA to have just
happened
along. I'd been had in spades. Miriam Kamel had led me into a trap.

I dropped the camera and tripod, pulled Wilhelmina from her holster and thumbed off the safety. The man I had spotted, realizing I had seen him, jumped up from behind the boulder, a fierce look on his face and a Russian PPsH submachine gun in his hands. I snap-aimed, pulled Wilhelmina's trigger and the Luger cracked, the terrorist jerking from the slug that thudded into his forehead. His eyes open and staring into eternity, he dropped the machine gun and crumpled to the ground.

As if Wilhelmina's sharp crack had been a signal, the other SLA terrorists jumped up from their hiding places behind boulders. I saw in that instant that what they had done was to creep up behind me and Miriam and form a semicircle to our rear. Not having time to count them, I saw only that they were dressed in khaki pants and shirts, wore combat boots and had their heads covered with
kaffiyehs.
Their weapons were sidearms and automatic weapons.

"Don't kill him!" Miriam yelled.
"Al-Huriya
wants him alive!"

I didn't have one chance in a million of escaping, but I was determined to put up a hell of a fight before they chopped me apart.

The terrorists, the white neck cloths of their
kaffiyehs
flying, charged toward me. I rushed toward the nearest SLA killer and cut him down with a flying doubled-legged piston kick. At the last moment, I straightened out my legs so that my thigh muscles had a chance to get into the act. My feet crashed into the man's midsection and he screamed.

While the man went flying backward, I spun my body around and dropped facedown, breaking my fall with my feet and left hand. My surprised move had disorganized the terrorists, their momentary confusion giving me the opportunity to jump to my feet and make Wilhelmina snarl. She did, twice, and two more men cried out in pain. One went down with a bullet through the groin, all the gasping sounds a requiem to his final seconds of life. The second man fell against another terrorist, my bullet, hitting him at an angle, having gone through his lungs.

The remaining Syrians closed in on me. Ducking the barrel of a machine gun swung at my head, I was about to put a 9mm hollow point into another of my attackers when a powerful hand grabbed my right wrist and an arm slid around my throat. I used the point of my left elbow to smash into the man's ribs. He howled and fell to one side, pulled his arm from my neck.

As the man holding my right wrist twisted Wilhelmina away from me, I used my left hand to jab him in the hollow of the throat, at the same time kicking backward to flatten the stomach of a man trying to slam me between the shoulder blades with the barrel of his sub-gun.

But I was fighting a losing battle. Again I was grabbed — both arms this time — and pulled in opposite directions.

I had been in this sort of fix before and knew what the two Syrians were thinking: that there wasn't anything I could do. But with my legs and feet I could do plenty. I kicked up with my right leg and drove my foot underneath the chin of the man holding my right arm. A long, low sound of agony jumped from his throat and he went down, unconscious.

The man holding my left arm thought that he was going to get help from a man darting at me to my right. They both got a surprise! With my left foot I stomped down as hard as I could on the right instep of the man hanging on to my arm, and felt his tarsus bone splinter. Immediately I delivered a pulverizing blow to the other man's abdomen. He gasped loudly, his eyes bugged out and he became as helpless as a newborn baby.

All of a sudden, someone knocked my right leg out from under me, and I started to fall to the right. Before I could recover my balance, a fist slammed against the left side of my head and a man threw himself on my back and kicked my left leg out from under me. Helpless but still struggling, I went down, the weight of the man's body pinning me, sharp stones cutting into my face. Something smashed against the back of my head. Stars exploded inside my head and a black velvet curtain dropped over my brain.