by Gar Wilson
"Hey, man, who you shucking? I don't re..."
"The girl you raped?''
Blackwell jerked, his eyes darting wide. "Hey, you..."
"The girl who killed your officers, then got away?" He paused to let his words sink in, the rifle continuing its mocking glide and nudge along the oily, black face. "Well, we found her. We helped her, nursed her back to life."
Again he paused. He grinned, savored the bewilderment in Blackwell's eyes as he moved a few paces away from him. "Here, you filthy bastard... Regards from Abu Darash. Nemtala sends you this."
Blackwell's voice broke. "No!" he gasped. "Hey, man, you can't... No. Please, no..."
Manning hovered over the screaming man. "Was she good, Blackwell?" he mocked, his voice haunted, guttural. "Did you enjoy raping her? Was she worth all this?" The rifle roamed again. "Was she worth this?"
And he put four, deliberate rounds into his gut. BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
There is no accounting for the incredible ability of the human body to survive physical insult. For when, by all reasonable measure, Jeremiah Blackwell should have died on the spot, the body lingered. The body still thrashed. The throat still emitted grotesque animal squealings.
But not for long. Manning shot into his heart. Yakov and Rafael at last advanced and dared to pull Manning aside.
They stood beside him, bolstered him as he turned away and began to heave his guts out, the sound of his gagging somehow less loud than the wrenching sobs that now began, that threatened to rupture the lining of his throat.
As they held their comrade, stared bleakly across at each other, they understood once and for all how real was the thin line between love and hate.
18
Moments later, as Gary Manning finally regained composure, Katz caught a flitting motion in the corner of his eye and put the others instantly on guard.
But it was false alarm. Emerging silently from the gloom was McCarter.
"Taxi, anyone?" McCarter chuckled. "My last run tonight. Cheapest rates in town." A grinning Salibogo clung to the side of the FAV.
Seeing the grim expressions on the faces of his mates, noting Manning's withdrawn, slumped stance, he was concerned. "What happened? Did we miss something?"
Encizo sent a sidelong glance to the right but said nothing.
McCarter hopped from the FAV and was followed by a solicitous Salibogo as he slid down the slight incline. Both men stood silently over the mangled remains for a brief time. McCarter knew a spasm of queasiness.
"Blackwell?" McCarter asked.
Encizo nodded gravely.
"And that damned missile? You got that much out of him, didn't you?"
"I think we did," Katz answered. "It's up ahead. Just where, I can't say." He climbed onto the FAV's running rail, clung to the rollover bars with his good arm. "Move it."
Again desperation built up as all realized that the technicians were now forewarned that the opposition was on the turf. If the missile was anywhere near liftoff, if the launch team was half as dedicated to the mission as Blackwell, they would be working frantically on last-minute calibrations, they would give their lives to make the bird fly.
Katz's eyes strained in the darkness for sight of any glimmer of light in the midst of these acres of phosphorous sores. Then, suddenly: "Over there," he hissed. "Did you see that?"
All eyes swept right, searched the inky blackness. As they came around a hundred-foot mound of slag, they detected a faint brightness against a rock face perhaps three-quarters of a mile deeper into the mine area.
Keio brought the FAV to ten, struggled valiantly to keep it on the badly deteriorated road.
"Close enough," Manning snapped as they came within five hundred yards of the base. He dropped off the vehicle, went in search of a blade of grass. "Maybe they've mined here," he murmured. "We can't afford to take any chances. McCarter, come along. I'll show you how this thing goes."
Manning demonstrated how the Briton should fan the blade of grass across the terrain. "The slightest resistance and you'll know you've got a customer." Manning produced a long wire probe; he began expert, delicate thrusts into the road's wheel ruts, the most logical place for buried mines.
They worked slowly, silently, moving ahead foot by foot, Keio sliding the FAV up each time Manning waved him on.
Tension built up maddeningly. More time lost. The missile could be in the act of being triggered at that very moment. As it turned out, there were no mines of any kind.
Finally Yakov ordered everyone off the vehicle. "We go in by foot from here. Keio, help Rafael lift off the Mark 19. The place will be crawling with Black Cobra guards. Blackwell isn't dumb enough... wasn't dumb enough... to leave the technicians on their own."
They followed Manning and McCarter in, skulking in low profile, feeling their way into the cleverly concealed site. Encizo shouldered the MK-19. Ohara labored under the magazines. Salibogo lugged the tripod.
As they found a trestled tunnel, saw bright light at its open end, they could understand why even McCarter and Keio, up on the hill, could not see it. The pit, reached by descending stagings where the Egyptians had worked until the mine petered out, was at least two hundred feet deep. There, in its deepest extension, was the missile, mounted on a steel gantry, pointed south at an eighty-degree angle.
Then, when Manning declared final all-clear, they eased forward and assumed stealthy station behind mounds of slag. They took a good look at the small rocket — only thirty-five, forty feet long at best.
"What in hell is it?" Keio murmured.
"Looks like a Nike Ajax to me," McCarter answered. On SAS duty in Laos and Vietnam in 1973, he had seen the missile before.
"Hell, aren't they damned near obsolete?" Encizo said.
"Don't sell that baby short," McCarter returned. "It's still used all over the world. If them techs know their stuff, the Nike Ajax will hit within ten square feet of the target. I'd expect it's carrying a one-megaton warhead. More than adequate. Once that baby hits, them old Egyptians can kiss their ass goodbye."
Katz was standing deep in shadow, his binoculars roving the site restlessly. "What do you see, Yakov?" Rafael asked.
"Much activity." The Phoenix headman smiled. "Looks as if we just might be in time. The Russians are going crazy down there putting finishing touches on things."
"Great," Encizo enthused. "We do get lucky sometimes."
Yakov beckoned for a strategy huddle; he outlined the part each man would play in the do-or-die rush of the launch site.
Each Phoenix Force member rose with grim determination in his eyes.
Shortly Rafael and Keio were picking their way down to the lower shelves, trying to work the Mark 19 to closer range, where its hell-dusters could do their ugly work. There were twenty Cobras and five technicians, Yakov had informed them. The MK-19 would provide surprise, soften-up barrage. The rest of the team, infiltrating to within fifty yards of the launching gantry, would concentrate on the rocket experts. No finger must be allowed to click that ignition switch.
Yakov, McCarter, Manning and Salibogo hugged the wall behind them and covered the duo as they crawled to the lip of shelf after shelf, carefully lowered themselves down, then lowered the minor cannon. They made four more shelves before they finally stopped. Drawing back into the shadows, they were seen no more.
Then the remaining marauders were scattering to circle the terrorists, beginning their grunting, sweating descent into hell.
It was tribute to the team's finely honed penetration skills that they were not observed as they slithered across mounds of overburden, as they utilized abandoned shafts, molded chameleonlike into open areas they were forced to traverse.
The Cobras were ready and waiting. Eyes darting, pondering the ominous silence off to the north, they watched for any sign of movement, for any betraying whisper of sound. Deeply entrenched in stonepile nests, three Goryonov MMGs in impregnable position — or so they thought — were deployed in a circling line some hundred yards from the missi
le. Anyone intending to abort their holy mission must come through them.
Black Africa's new dawn was in their hands. Blood Doctor was depending on them. They would not fail him.
Watching from above, Keio and Rafael caught a fleeting glimpse of their mates as they bored closer to the Cobra lines. They pinpointed the main nests, knew their fire must be true and swift. Without the FAV's mobility the Goryonovs would chop them to stew scraps once they achieved fix on the MK-19's position.
In and out. Get each foxhole with one quick burst.
Finally, there was no further movement by Phoenix Force.
"Here we go," Keio said, making a last check on the tripod, retesting the magazine lock.
Abruptly the terrorists were shaken from their fear stupor as the distant thunder started to the northwest. Unwisely they craned their necks, tried to see where the noise was coming from. In that split second the first grenade cartridges came floating in. There was an end-of-the-world detonation, a skull-collapsing explosion, a lethal sleet of lead. Tops of heads were suddenly missing; faces were turned to imploded mush; lungs ceased functioning.
In the first firehole the MMG operator never got off round one. And as those unlucky enough to survive leaped up to take over, there was ripping Uzi fire from directly in front of them; 9mm parabellums wrote bloody finish to lives that never amounted to a damn in the first place. Flesh chunked, bone splintered, blood gushed from a dozen different openings.
Fire station one became summarily inoperative.
Before the hardmen in the next foxhole were even able to get a handle on their desperate straits, the lightning-bolt weapon had switched direction, its trajectory was lifted. Again the fury bombs arced in. New bloodbath. Salibogo pumped AK-47 slugs into the flopping bundles of human flesh.
The murder monster moved on, to the extreme south, reaching for the circle's farthest arc. The death rain commenced anew, chewed away stone splinters with devastating force, compounded on the misery created by the splashing 40mm lead shards. It was Manning who emerged from the mist of smoke and blood, saw to a vengeful coup de grace.
McCarter, at the most distant lair of all — unreachable by the MK-19 — cleaned out his complement singlehandedly. Using a trio of M-26 grenades for openers, his AK-47 to nail things down, he had five men ticketed for hell in seconds flat.
By this time, as ordered, Encizo was lobbing rounds to the rear of the Cobra lines, the Mark 19 straining to reach the base of the Nike Ajax missile itself, to chill the critical countdown if possible. The rounds kept falling short, and Rafael groaned with rage. The job was in the hands of the ground troops. He saw Yakov, Manning and Salibogo leaping toward the panicky technicians as they ducked for cover, streaked away from the gantry.
At that moment the ground trembled. A fiery, blinding ball of light — a million volts of incandescent fury-exploded at the base of the gantry. And with a jarring, throaty roar the Nike Ajax flung itself into the sky.
"No, goddammit, no," Encizo groaned, his hand shielding his eyes against the glare. Not now, he thought, not when we were so close.
McCarter saw the bird go, paused to pound three more slugs into a particularly stubborn terrorist, then he whirled back, his eyes following the white, jetting arrow as it climbed at eighty, a hundred, a hundred twenty miles per hour. His heart plummeted. "Goodbye, Aswan," he muttered in hoarse rage.
Those closest to the gantry swung back, caught the Soviet missile boys in the process of bringing up their own weapons. Yakov, Manning and Salibogo emptied their magazines into the half-ass warriors, garnered small satisfaction from watching their final death throes.
Then they froze into slumped, defeated stance, stared into the heavens.
The missile, a phosphorescent white hole, burned into the canopy of velvet sky, became smaller and smaller.
But then, with stunning, lung-compacting suddenness, the sky to the north seemed to open up, as if cleaved by a monstrous guillotine. And from that fissure, a new, deafening thunder.
Almost instantaneously there came the heart-stopping snarl of a jet, a mile up, its sonic boom splitting the firmament even as it closed on the Nike Ajax.
Grimaldi. The Tomcat. He had been there all the time, hanging back, heat sensors beamed precisely.
They could not see the Grumman F-14, nor could they see the Sidewinder AIM 9L that was now launched from underneath the Tomcat's wing. Almost simultaneously a second Sidewinder hissed into the night, backup should the initial rocket somehow fail to hit. It was upon the Nike Ajax before it was ten miles downrange.
There was a second sonic boom, a second jarring beneath their feet. The sky lighted up with a gigantic flash like heat lightning. The light illuminated the hard, victorious faces of the Phoenix team, cast harsh glare on the junk-pile chaos they had just created in the desert.
Somewhere over Lake Nasser stainless steel confetti rained down, like a Fourth of July flameout. The inactivated nuke warhead splashed down also and sank into two hundred feet of Nile water. Secretly dispatched U.S. Navy frogman teams would be weeks digging that baby out.
There were no cheers, no slapping on the back, no quick, congratulatory embraces. There was only a collective expulsion of breath, a rush of blood, an unspoken sense of pride.
Phoenix Force had come through again.
As might be expected, it was McCarter who summed up their feelings just then — with typical irreverence, to be sure.
"Grimaldi," he taunted the night sky, "you bloody bastard. Up there all the time, weren't you? Laughing your ass off at us. You'll never let us live this one down, will you?"
19
Saying goodbye to Salibogo Mugunga was one of the hardest things the men of Phoenix Force had ever had to do. In the fifteen days since their paths had crossed they had become as close as brothers. Insofar as one man could love another they had come to love the crusty old curmudgeon.
Fighting side by side, risking your life for one another will do that every time.
Jack Grimaldi, flying in at dawn behind the controls of a Sikorsky UH-60A Blackhawk, was standing by, the rotor-flap loud in the quiet desert air. All vital supplies, all components of their traveling armory were loaded. Only the laggard swat-team was holding up the program.
"C'mon, you guys," Grimaldi groused, "let's move it. Colonel Phoenix's waiting on you. What's with this old fart, anyway?"
They drew Salibogo apart, told him for the tenth time that it was impossible for them to take him along.
The Stony Man cleanup team, gathered from top-secret international sources, would arrive on the scene tomorrow. They would remove all evidence of this wholesale carnage from the face of the earth in a matter of days. The outside world must never know what had transpired here, how close it had come to slipping into the final abyss.
Apocalypse.
Salibogo was safe here until the cleanup crew arrived; he could salvage weapons, ammunition, supplies to his heart's content.
The Land Rover was his. Or he could take one of the Unimogs that had miraculously survived the holocaust, Phoenix-style. And wasn't that what he wanted? To become Sudan's most successful arms dealer? To be a wealthy man?
"No, effendi," Salibogo persisted, a heartbreaking sadness in his eyes, "I no care about that. I want go with you. We fight side by side again, no?"
"Maybe, my friend," Colonel Yakov Katzenelenbogen said, his voice — despite his years of hard action — decidedly breaking just then. "Maybe, someday, somehow, we will fight together again. Who can say? I hope so. You are a good soldier. A brave man. We will all miss you."
Then it was time to go. One by one the Phoenix team approached the old man, offered a firm handclasp, a quick embrace. Encizo's Latin temperament surfacing, he gave the weeping man a long bear hug.
"Hasta la vista," he said finally, blinking hard. "Until we meet again, abuelo."
Manning, breaking with his traditional reserve, said his farewells in the same way. And as they broke their embrace, Salibogo looked up into his eye
s, a plaintive, shy smile twisting his battered face. "You not forget Nemtala?"
"No, father," Manning said softly. "I will never forget Nemtala. For me she lives forever."
The old man stood just outside the rotor wash, his galabieh plastered to his scrawny body, waving feebly as they loaded aboard the Sikorsky. He forced a smile, but it was plain to all that his heart was not in it.
"Goodbye, Salibogo," McCarter called gruffly, fighting hard to retain his tough-guy image. "Don't you go standing at the wrong end of any camels, you hear?"
Then the hatch was dogged, the engines revved up. The copter — the FAV snugged on cables beneath — began slow lift-off.
For a long time after he could no longer see their faces, Salibogo stood in the desert, one arm still held high, but motionless. His heart leaden, he thought he would never see such fighting men — such friends — as they again.
In the chopper there were no words. All stared back at the lone figure in the desert. They watched as long as they could see him.
When they saw Salibogo move away, begin gathering weapons again, they all smiled. Some of the tightness in their throats was gone.
About the Author
Gar Wilson is the pseudonym of a veteran antiterrorist expert who began his career with the Special Operations Group, Vietnam, in the mid-1960s. He later served with Delta Unit, a U.S. antiterrorist organization, and has worked with such international antiterrorist operations as Israel's Mossad, West Germany's GSG-9 and Britain's SAS. Owing to the policies of the United Nations and the U.S. government in the late 1970s, Wilson resigned his seat on the Coordinating Committee on Terrorism of the National Security Council. The author of the Phoenix Force series writes about antiterrorism in the manner he has always favored: expecting no quarter and giving none. His writing is renowned for its bloody realism.