Syrian Rescue

by Don Pendleton

  Who was he? How had he assumed possession of the BTR-152? In truth, Mourad cared less for the answers to those questions than for one chance to eliminate his shouting enemy. One shot could do it, if the maniac descended, searching for him.

  Mourad did not believe in wishing, but it seemed to work this time. After one last barrage of insults and obscenities, he heard footsteps above him on the APC’s steel floorboard. He could track the howler’s movements by those footsteps, knew when he had reached the driver’s door and opened it, then stepped onto the dry soil. Instead of clanking, now the footsteps crunched as they circled around the armored vehicle.

  “I smell you under there, you rat,” said the madman, almost crooning now. “You smell like shit and piss, hiding under there.”

  Mourad followed the sounds until he caught a glimpse of shoes and trouser cuffs. He gripped his Makarov so tightly that his knuckles cracked, and he worried the sound had given him away.

  “Come out, you filthy coward. Face me in your dying moment, General.”

  Mourad followed the moving feet until they passed from sight, then waited until they reappeared. This time, they stopped approximately level with the spot where Mourad lay concealed, beneath the APC’s drive shaft.

  Suddenly, the hunter dropped to one knee, and bending lower, poked his head and an assault rifle under the vehicle. “I see you, General!” he crowed, grinning in triumph.

  Mourad shot him with the Makarov, its rapid-fire reports numbing his ears. He saw the stranger’s face transformed into a grisly mask, but not before the dead man’s index finger clenched around the trigger of his rifle.

  Muzzle-flashes lit up the underside of the APC, and then Mourad’s world went black.

  * * *

  THIS HELICOPTER WAS easier to take out than the last one, sitting still, unoccupied, not strafing Bolan with its autocannon. After making sure the four remaining diplomats were well clear of the RPG’s back-blast, he aimed and put his rocket through the bird’s windshield and into the cockpit, where it detonated with a clap of smoky thunder, guaranteeing that the Mil Mi-8 would never fly again without a total overhaul.

  Job done.

  Bolan’s next target, while the camp still reeled from his destruction of the helicopter, was the nearest BTR-152. Its turret gun had fallen silent, and it seemed to be unoccupied, although he guessed that wouldn’t last for long.

  “This way!” he told the others, breaking for the Russian APC. The diplomats trailed him obediently, Sabah Azmeh covering the rear.

  His luck held when he reached the APC and found its driver’s door wide open. Bolan ducked inside, confirming that no soldiers were hiding there and that he could start the vehicle with a push button instead of a key.

  Before starting the engine, Bolan mounted two low metal steps to reach the gun turret. He swung the heavy NSV around to face the second APC in camp, fixing its sights on the machine-gunner who hadn’t left his post and whose weapon posed the only real threat to their escape once they’d rolled out of camp.

  That shooter never knew what hit him. Bolan’s sudden storm of 12.7 mm rounds caught the gunner unaware and ripped his upper body into pieces. When he’d dropped from sight, Bolan glanced down and found his five companions all inside the APC, its door securely shut.

  “Do you know how to drive this thing?” he asked Azmeh.

  “Yes, sir!” Azmeh answered, smiling.

  “Okay, get us out of here. Eastbound. The rest of you lie down. Stay on the floor and brace yourselves. We’ve got a bumpy ride ahead.”

  Bolan remained at the NSV, keeping watch for any opponents, as Azmeh fired up the engine, shifted into gear and put the APC in motion, cranking through a U-turn. As far as Bolan knew from scanning maps and satellite photos, no settlements lay on the path he’d chosen from here all the way to the Iraqi border, some one hundred fifty miles due east.

  The APC rolled over tents and corpses, its ten tons flattening everything in its path. Living soldiers sprang aside, uncertain what to make of the retreating vehicle, and Bolan let them go. They had enough to do already, with the battle going on, and none tried to obstruct his passage through the camp.

  Later, if they won the fight, they might pursue him in their cargo trucks—which matched the APC’s top speed of forty-six miles per hour and had larger gas tanks—but the trucks weren’t armed, except for whatever weapons their passengers carried. Nor were they armored. If it came to that, he’d make short work of them with the NSV well before they closed to rifle range.

  “How much gas do we have left?” he shouted down to Azmeh.

  “Three-quarters full.”

  No sweat on that account, at least. Three-quarters of a tank would give them three hundred miles, still twice the distance from their starting point to the Iraqi border—not that Bolan planned to drive that far. He had another plan in mind, uncertain whether it would work or not, but it was damn sure worth a try.

  * * *

  CAPTAIN FAKHRI THOUGHT the world was ending when the helicopter exploded, struck by a rocket from within his camp. Seconds later, when the fuel tanks blew, a plume of fire blazed into the sky, and for a moment, the camp seemed to be bathed in sunlight.

  In that stark light, Fakhri saw that he was losing. Even with his enemies outnumbered two-to-one, ditto on heavy weapons, they were beating him, routing his soldiers who were still alive and fit for battle. It was shameful and infuriating, standing there with bullets whispering around him, waiting for his life and his career to be snuffed out.

  But there was worse yet still to come.

  Fakhri was moving toward the APCs for cover when he saw one of them turn its NSV machine gun on its neighbor, taking out the other turret gunner with a short burst. Bewildered, Fakhri heard the rogue vehicle’s engine roar to life and saw it grinding through an awkward U-turn, batting troops aside with its extended ramming bumper, running over those who fell in its path. It roared through the camp, trailing tattered tent canvas behind it, racing from the battle toward the dark desert.

  Fakhri turned to where the prisoners should have been and found them gone, two of their guards lying in bloody heaps. He nearly panicked then, visions of court-martial and execution flashing through his mind, until the sheer absurdity of that struck him and actually made him laugh.

  He was unlikely to survive the next ten minutes, much less face a military trial, unless he took dramatic action on his own to end the firefight and retrieve his prisoners. In spite of everything, he could complete his mission if he had the strength and courage required.

  Fakhri ran toward the second APC, yanked its door open and crawled in, slipping on blood and brains to reach the turret with its NSV machine gun. There, he checked the ammo box and swung the weapon toward his enemies south of the camp. Their ranks were thinning, and their lead vehicle was in flames. They only needed one last push to finish them. Captain Bassam Fakhri was determined to provide it.

  Grinning like a maniac, he held down the machine gun’s trigger, raking deadly fire along the tattered skirmish line. He did not count the moving targets, barely noticed as they lurched, jerked and toppled to the ground with 12.7 mm bullets ripping through their flesh. Watching the slaughter, Fakhri’s men regrouped and found their courage once again, raised battle cries and charged their enemies.

  In moments, it was over. Fakhri ducked inside the APC to grab the microphone from the dashboard. “Quiet!” he shouted, his voice booming through the camp. “Listen! Our prisoners are fleeing. If we cannot get them back, we all face trial for dereliction of our duty!”

  Sobered in an instant, waiting for his order, his surviving soldiers gave Fakhri their rapt attention.

  “Join me!” he commanded. “We’ll go after them and bring them back. The mission can be saved!”

  Sergeant Malki answered first, appearing out of nowhere through the battle smoke. “I’ll drive, Captain,” he said. “What are we waiting for?”

  * * *

  “WHO ARE YOU?” Robert Segrest asked wh
en the camp was a mile or more behind them. “Where’d you come from?”

  “State can brief you when they’re ready,” Bolan answered from the driver’s seat. “Right now, I need to use the radio.”

  “Now, see here—”

  “Go sit down,” Bolan commanded, in a voice that brooked no argument. Segrest seemed to be on the verge of saying more, then reconsidered and returned to his bench seat on the left side of the APC’s spacious troop compartment. Sabah Azmeh had the turret, facing backward just in case.

  Bolan checked the dashboard-mounted two-way radio’s setting before he palmed the microphone. He confirmed the radio’s frequency was set for International Telecommunication Union Region 1, including all of Europe, Russia, Africa and the Middle East west of Iran.

  A thousand ears might pick up Bolan’s broadcast, but he didn’t care, as long the right ears were listening in Baghdad.

  The CIA was still in place in the city, reporting each attack, each bombing, each new skirmish back to Washington. They were supposed to be on board for Bolan’s mission, handling the lift-out if he made it that far, but experience had taught him that the agency was not always reliable.

  However, right now, they appeared to be the only game in town.

  “Striker calling Backfire,” Bolan said into the microphone, repeating it three times before an answer came back.

  “Backfire reading. Over.”

  “Calling in for pickup as agreed,” Bolan replied. “Over.”

  “Roger that, Striker. We’ll need coordinates for pickup.”

  “Wait one,” Bolan said, and checked his GPS. He had a spot in mind, picked out on Google Earth for isolation and accessibility. He double-checked coordinates and gave them back to Baghdad.

  “Liftoff within fifteen,” the voice of Backfire told him. “Pickup estimated within sixty-five.”

  Minutes, that was. They had to stay alive for one more hour and be waiting at the pickup site he had arranged.

  No problem. Unless the Syrians came after them.

  As if in answer to his thought, Azmeh bent down from his turret post. “I see headlights.”

  13

  There were enough men left in camp to fill the eighteen seats aboard the BTR-152, with Sergeant Malki driving and Captain Fakhri in the shotgun seat. Their enemies had a head start, but it was not extreme, no more than twenty minutes. Fakhri believed he could overtake the fleeing APC, but first they had to find it, which meant spotting lights in the vast, dark desert that surrounded them.

  Searching the night with narrowed eyes, he let his mind drift to the questions that were haunting him: Who had absconded with his prisoners, and why?

  There seemed to be three possibilities. First, rebels from the party he’d defeated could have done it, two or three of them dispatched to infiltrate the camp while the majority distracted Fakhri and his soldiers. As to why rebels might flee eastward with the hostages, he could not say. In the short term, simply escaping from the army camp might be their goal—in which case, they weren’t likely to continue east for any great distance, and Fakhri might have lost their trail already.

  Second—a far-fetched idea, but still conceivable—another army unit might have been dispatched to claim the prisoners without his knowledge, and perhaps without Mourad’s. He could not ask the general; Mourad had been found dead with one of the six diplomats who had seemingly run amok during the firefight, killing several soldiers in a fruitless effort to break free. If regular commandos were involved, their eastward flight from camp could simply be an effort to avoid the firefight prior to striking off for whatever part of the country they called home base.

  And what would that mean, if the army trusted Fakhri so little that they would give him an assignment, then snatch it away clandestinely?

  The answer to that question could be grim indeed.

  But still, it was the third option that troubled Fakhri most. If outsiders had taken the prisoners, where had they come from? Who’d sent them? How had they penetrated Fakhri’s camp unnoticed, even with a firefight going on? And most importantly, where would they take the hostages?

  Fakhri believed he knew the answer to the last question, at least. The plane bearing his former prisoners had flown in from Iraq, whose feeble government was still in thrall to the United States. The White House, Fakhri knew from the reports he’d heard over Damascus Radio, hated Syria’s president and wished to see him dead or groveling in muck. The so-called “diplomatic mission” had been geared to that result. Why wouldn’t Western agents try to save the spies, once the trip had gone awry?

  Now Fakhri had a choice to make. If he believed the third idea, it meant his enemies were fleeing toward Iraq, but he still needed to find them in the desert. Syria’s border with Iraq was nearly four hundred miles long, but no sensible fugitive would run to the extremes of north or south. Realistically, Fakhri thought he had a forty- or fifty-mile front to worry about, and a relatively straight run to the border seemed most likely, on or near the course he had already set.

  In theory, if he was correct, all Fakhri had to do was hold that course and watch for lights ahead, then do his best to overtake the stolen APC.

  Which, he realized, could be a challenge in itself.

  The BTR-152s were matched in terms of armor and defensive weapons. He might have more soldiers, but they did Fakhri no good in a motorized chase. If anything, there was a chance their extra weight might slow his progress just enough to give the enemy a slim advantage when it came to speed. And if he lost them…

  I might as well keep going, Fakhri said to himself. Surrender at the border, seek asylum and be done with it.

  The foolish thought struck Captain Fakhri like a slap across the face. He stiffened in his seat and refocused on the pitch-black night in front of him, searching for any sign to give him hope.

  And had a sudden inspiration.

  “Malki, kill the headlights!” he commanded.

  “Sir?” The sergeant sounded both confused and worried. “We could crash, or—”

  “Do it!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Malki did as he was told.

  * * *

  BOLAN CHECKED THE mirror and saw a single pair of headlights following his dust trail several miles back. Then, suddenly, they winked out.

  “They’re gone!” Azmeh called down to him.

  “I see that.”

  Bolan weighed the odds of a coincidental follower and judged that they were nil. But it would be suicide to drive without headlights on this terrain. The fact that they’d been using the high beams at all suggested they didn’t have night-vision technology. Bolan saw only two possibilities. The chase vehicle could have crashed into a wadi or a boulder, or the driver was trying to run a stealth maneuver on the enemy.

  Too late for that, but with their lights out, the pursuers could gain ground without Bolan observing them, at least until they’d closed the gap enough to open fire.

  He checked the APC’s speedometer and saw that they were maxed out. Remembering the vehicles he’d seen in camp, there had been only one—the UAZ-469—that had a slight edge on the APC for speed, at fifty miles per hour maximum.

  The down side for his enemies, if they’d chosen the land rover, was that it carried no machine gun mount. Its armament on contact would be limited to small arms carried by its passengers—unless, that is, one of them had the foresight to include an RPG.

  The other APC in camp would have more trouble catching him, but it could carry twenty soldiers, and it had an NSV machine gun in its turret. They’d be matched on firepower in that case, and it could go either way.

  Bolan had a choice: run it out and lead them to the pickup site, or stand and deal with it right now.

  Turning the options over in his mind, Bolan pressed down on the accelerator, grinding through the endless desert night.

  * * *

  CAPTAIN FAKHRI COULD see the fleeing taillights better with his own headlights turned off. They looked like red rat’s eyes. It gal
led Fakhri to know that they belonged to his own APC, now diverted into the service of his enemies.

  Whoever they were.

  He still had no idea, but he had nearly given up on caring. In an ideal situation, Fakhri would have loved to capture them alive, retrieve the prisoners, and grill their rescuers until he knew the story of their lives, the names and nationalities of their employers, why they had been sent to torment him. But the odds of that occurring were slim to none.

  His best bet was simply to annihilate the opposition, along with the four surviving captives they had rescued. Fakhri had not thought to bring the video equipment with him, in his haste to overtake the rescue party, but that hardly mattered now. His scheme had been derailed beyond repair, becoming a debacle, and he would be lucky to survive when he reported back to headquarters. As for promotion, decoration, all those other cherished fantasies—forget it.

  He would never rise above his present rank and was unlikely to retain it very long. If he avoided a court-martial and a hangman’s noose, Fakhri would offer prayers of thanks to Allah for his blessings.

  How he hated them, these strangers he had never met. Without a passing thought for Fakhri, they had crept into his life and fouled it, like a burglar who not only steals but also feels compelled to vandalize a home before he slinks away. His rage was limitless. Given the chance, he could annihilate a thousand men and still not be appeased.

  But there were not a thousand men inside the fleeing APC. Four former prisoners and…what? No more than two or three combatants at the most, he guessed. Fakhri, with nineteen men behind him, should have no great difficulty killing them.

  And yet…

  He could not shake his anxiety, a sense of overlooking something that could easily rebound to damage him. No matter how he tried to focus in the noisy, jolting APC, the kernel of his thought eluded him.

  One more spark of fury added to the crackling flame inside his head. If he could just—