Angels Don't Die

by Petrek, Soren

  John watched the two men on the terrace drop in rapid succession through the night vision binoculars strapped around his neck. He made a last minute inspection of the big Russian machinegun and pulled back the slide. The noise sounded deafening in the silence of the night but he knew the sound wouldn’t carry into the compound. He hoped Tracy was inside the house, but his instincts told him otherwise. Why keep a valuable commodity within the easy reach of the Israelis? The PLO had to be unnerved after the loss of their terror squad, and may have moved Tracy right away.

  No, this would probably be another message from Madeleine, perhaps one step closer to finding his son. He reminded himself that Tracy was a highly trained agent. But as parents do, he seemed to forget everything else but concern now that his child was in danger. This was different from the countless missions he’d led, some successful, others a standoff. He trained his weapon on the center of the terrace, anticipating that the action would start soon.

  Madeleine moved towards the barracks. The building was a simple affair, a concrete box with a door at either end. There were a couple of small windows and a vent on top to disperse the heat that the roof collected during the fierce heat of the day. It was not designed for comfort and the men housed inside were not yet in their bunks. The satchel charge Madeleine had slung over her shoulder would be more than enough to turn the building into a blasted pile of rubble. As she approached, Madeleine saw two military Jeeps parked in an open garage away from the main barracks. The vehicles looked well maintained and camouflaged for the desert terrain. They bore no insignia, but were armed and battle ready. Madeleine moved into the garage once she determined that it was deserted. She could hear muffled laughter and a curse or two coming from the barracks, the sounds of soldiers winding down for the evening. As always, her night senses seemed more acute as she detected the smell of strong tobacco coming from inside the building. It was highly unlikely that any of the men inside were armed or expecting an attack. Madeleine pulled her penlight from inside her fatigues and quickly swept the light throughout the interior of the garage where the vehicles were maintained. She spotted a trash can and went over to investigate. She found an empty cigarette package and pushed it into an inside pocket of her field jacket along with a few other discarded papers. She expected that they were instructions for parts used to replace engine parts that so readily broke down having to operate under desert conditions. Sand was the enemy. The fine dust of the particulate portion of sand got into everything. Maintenance of weapons, vehicles, clothing, radios; simply everything was subjected to the grit. She had known brief combat in the desert during the war. Even a short encounter with desert combat had taught her a valuable lesson. It is the worst place to fight. Jungles provided cover and water. The desert provides only what you bring into it. She remembered the extreme lack of water. Here, water was the difference between life and death.

  Moving away from the parked vehicles, Madeleine made her way over to the barracks, crouching close to the ground, her pistol held out in front trained towards the door nearest the rear of the main house. A fleeting consideration of mercy ran through her mind as she placed the satchel charge carefully against the middle of the exterior wall of the barracks. The dark place in her mind swallowed the notion as quickly as it had arisen. If these soldiers were in concert with the PLO, they were the enemy. A warning had been given and the answer had been violence against the Mossad. So be it. She primed the charge and engaged the fuse. She moved towards the main house and tucked herself into the shadows. When the charge detonated, the guards inside the house would instinctively run towards the barracks and their comrades. Perhaps a few might have the discipline to stay at their posts, but she doubted it.

  A huge flash and explosion ripped the barracks to shreds. As expected, several men ran from the house toward the burning barracks, only to be cut down by John’s machinegun as the echoes of the explosion still tore the night air. Spent bullet casing pinged off the surrounding rocks, collecting at John’s feet. Madeline would be inside in a few seconds. If Tracy was there, she would find him.

  Al Lubnani tumbled out of bed in his upstairs room as the concussive force of the explosion hit the main house. He cursed as he pulled on a pair of shorts, grabbing an assault rifle leaning against the wall next to the bedroom door. He ran shirtless into the hallway as men came out of the doorways of several rooms, guns in hand.

  “You two men stay with me,” Al Lubnani shouted, gesturing to the closest. The remainder of the men rushed as one towards the front door of the house, running through the entryway and out into the darkness, blinded by the change from the light of the interior of the house. They had no time to adjust to night vision as they hurried towards the fiery ruin of the barracks. They ran by, unaware that Madeleine was in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs with her guns trained on them.

  As soon as the men passed her, Madeleine was up the stairs, pausing briefly at the top. Men were moving around the interior of the home, but John’s barrage from the high ground had drawn their attention away from the front door. The men defending the house returned fire up the hill with automatic weapons. Madeleine listened closely to determine the number of shooters and the type of weapons they carried. She ducked inside. Moving away from the open vestibule near the front door, she moved towards the interior of the house and located a closed door. While the rest of the doors had been left open by the exiting men, this door was closed. It was barred on the outside with a heavy strip of metal that slid into place, preventing escape from within. She slid back the bolt, and swung the door open, revealing a long flight of steps. She pulled the door closed behind her. Madeleine reached under her field jacket and extracted another small charge. A small carefully wrapped piece of C-4 explosive, covered in an adhesive that allowed her to attach it to the middle of the door, nearest the position of the bar. If she was discovered, she did not want to be trapped below. She moved to the bottom of the stairs. A light was on and she expected that at least one man would be at the bottom. Since he was locked in, he would have no way of reacting to the explosion unless another guard came to relieve him. Madeleine turned at the bottom of the stairs, crouching with a single pistol raised. A man sat in a chair positioned in the middle of the hallway, holding his assault rifle at the ready, but the barrel was pointed away from the bottom of the stairwell. Madeleine fired twice, killing the man instantly, moving down the hall as she pulled the trigger. She kicked the body over and patted him down, retrieving a set of keys. There were three cells at equal distances down the corridor. She opened each in rapid succession. The first was empty except for a mattress on the floor and a bucket for a toilet. In the second room a small figure stirred when she entered. A young Israeli man was waiting by the door, it wasn’t Tracy.

  “Follow me out if you want to get away,” Madeleine said in English.

  “If you’re looking for the American, they moved him two days ago,” came the immediate reply. “I’m Captain Ben Wiesel, Israeli army. I was sent to gather some intelligence on this place and got careless.”

  “Then grab that AK and any ammunition on the body. We’re going out the same way I came in, and will probably have to fight our way out. I took out the barracks and have a man on the ridge pouring fire down on the back terrace. They won’t be pinned down long, if they use those Jeeps to charge up the hill.”

  Madeleine ducked out the door as Wiesel followed her out into the hallway. He stopped and picked up the Kalashnikov, ran the slide and watched as Madeleine opened the last door to verify that it was empty.

  “I had to check,” Madeleine said, brushing past him.

  “You’re not American,” Wiesel said, following her back up the hallway.

  “French,” Madeleine said over her shoulder as she moved down the hall towards the stairwell.

  Madeleine took the stairs two at a time until she reached the top. She carefully opened the door and peered out through the crack. Bullets struck the door, bouncing off the metal surface. Without hesitatio
n, Madeleine grabbed the small charge off the door. She flattened herself against the stairs, motioning for the man behind her to do the same. He crouched down, the Kalashnikov at the ready. She pushed open the door as two more rounds were fired at chest height into the stairwell. Madeleine lobbed the charge between two men. Out of instinct one of the men caught the bomb, not recognizing what it was until Madeleine’s bullet struck it, detonating it. The explosion took out the two men and most of the entryway behind them.

  “Go,” Madeleine yelled, running out of the basement through the dust and smoke of the explosion. Her gun sprayed an arc of death in the direction of the men running across the yard. Wiesel opened up with the Kalashnikov, scattering the rest. Before the guards could regroup, Madeleine and the Israeli were out of the parking area and back into the shadows.

  John heard the concussion from inside the house and switched the machinegun off of full automatic. The return fire was getting more accurate and he expected a frontal attack at any moment. He trained the gun on the middle of the terrace, repositioning it so that the bullets struck the ground approximately fifty yards from the rear of the building. He knew they would also come up both flanks. It was time to leave. He scanned quickly with the night binoculars and just caught the flash of a tiny pen light. Gone, it said in Morris code.

  “Damn,” John muttered, hoping Tracy was with Madeleine as he moved away from the machinegun and ran towards Karen’s position. He wanted to get there as quickly as he could, knowing that when the defenders swept the area, they would find her.

  Karen heard the blast when the barracks exploded. The sound seemed deafening even at her distance. She had never heard or felt anything as terrifying. Her body registered the remnants of the shockwave as it spread out in all directions from the center of the blast. She moved closer to the Range Rover, but stopped at what she thought was a safe distance, if men came and fired a rocket at it. Her instincts told her to get into the driver’s seat, and to be ready to run as soon as John came back. She took comfort in hearing the distinctive sound of the gun John was firing. As long as she heard it, she knew he was alive. She was strangely excited and terrified at the same time, hoping against hope to see two Trunce men come back from the fight.

  “I hope you have a ride,” Wiesel yelled out to Madeleine as they ran south and away from the main building, in an attempt to split up their pursuers. By now the men following them would have regrouped and discovered that their attackers were divided and moving in two directions.

  “We do,” Madeleine responded, gesturing towards the rise and John’s former position. “We have a man on the ridge and plenty of firepower. Our vehicles are spaced apart back by the road. Most of their troops were in the barracks. I’m fairly certain that we’ll only have to deal with a dozen or so, but they have transport. I think the blast must have taken out the two Jeeps I saw next to the barracks, but I’m sure they have others.”

  “They brought me in a troop carrier. It’s armed with a heavy machinegun and a mortar launcher. A patrol was out in it when I got spotted out in the desert a couple of days ago. They were pretty bold to be training in the thing this far inside Israel. So, it was stupid of me to get caught,” Wiesel said running up alongside Madeleine. “What did you do to the barracks?”

  “I took it out with enough C-4 to blow it twice.”

  “What about the men inside?”

  “You won’t have to worry about them,” Madeleine said flatly, clearly not inviting further discussion concerning the barracks.

  Wiesel nodded, content to follow his rescuer away from the torture he’d suffered and a grim death he certainly expected. “Thank you for the rescue,” he added. “I thought I would never get out of there alive.”

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Madeleine said.

  “I doubt you picked that up in France,” Wiesel said, surprised as he recognized the old Arab proverb.

  “No,” Madeleine said. “I’ll explain it later. Now we have to get out of here and back to report to the Mossad and your army.”

  “After your attack, Israel might be at war already,” he said with determination.

  “You sound like you welcome it,” Madeleine answered.

  “I want to crush any threat to my homeland.”

  “So do I,” Madeleine said as Jack’s vehicle came into view.

  Jack lay over the top of the Jeep with an automatic weapon trained slightly to the right of Madeleine and Wiesel covering their escape.

  “Time to go, I take it,” Jack said as he maintained his position. “You’ve got a tail, he continued, sensing movement on the far side of the rocks from where Madeleine and Wiesel had just come.

  “I took out the vehicles I saw,” Madeleine said, as she jumped into the back seat, motioning for Wiesel to slide into the seat next to her.

  “You seem to make friends wherever you go,” Jack shouted, ramming the gears into place and shooting forward.

  “He was a guest of our former friends. Jack, this is Benjamin Wiesel,” Madeleine said, reaching under the seat and withdrawing two sub machineguns, handing one to Wiesel. “We have no ammo for the 47, so set it aside. Concentrate your fire on their tires and keep any forward shooters pinned inside the vehicle. They can’t anticipate our movements and have to react. They only have the option of disabling our vehicle; I don’t think they can radio ahead.”

  Madeleine and Wiesel opened fire as one with short, sustained bursts at their pursuers. Two vehicles, an armored troop carrier with an open top and a faster moving Jeep, sped forward and started to close the distance. The troop carrier returned fire with a mounted machinegun, its heavy bullets tearing into the ground to the side and behind Jack’s Range Rover.

  “Take out the gunner,” Madeleine yelled over the roar of the engine and the endless staccato of the heavy gun. “If he hits us, we’re done.”

  Madeleine saw the young man’s determination. His training was evident.

  “We need John,” Jack yelled over his shoulder.

  “He might have his hands full too,” Madeleine added locking her ankles under the front seat to steady herself as she returned fire focusing on the shallow gun turret in the troop carrier, silently willing John to show up and flank the pursuing vehicle.

  John reached the bottom of the hill, and moved towards Karen’s position. When he was close, he took cover and called out to her, not wanting to frighten her by running up unannounced.

  “Karen, get ready,” John yelled.

  John saw Karen get up and run to the Range Rover, jumping into the driver’s seat. She watched out the window as he approached. He came around to the driver’s side and spoke to her through the open window.

  “We will have company. Madeleine blew that place to hell,” John said smiling at Karen. “I’m going to stay out of the vehicle for a moment in case I have to fire on anyone following me.”

  “Won’t they be more likely to chase Madeleine first, as she was closest?” Karen answered.

  “You’re probably right. You’re catching on fast. We’ll be leaving in a few moments. Maybe Madeleine found Tracy.”

  “I’m not going to get my hopes up until we know for sure,” Karen answered.

  Karen and John heard gunfire coming in their direction.

  “I’ll get in shortly,” John said. “We’ll take off when we see what Madeleine’s situation is. We should be ok if any men come from my direction. I left a few mines over by the base of the hill to discourage anyone coming from that direction. Madeleine knows not to stray over there.”

  John moved around to the back of the Range Rover and opened the back doors. He pulled a large semi-automatic rifle from under the back seat. He propped it up so that he could quickly grab it. He saw lights in the distance. By their erratic movements, he could tell that Madeleine and Jack were in full flight. The headlights behind them were closing in. He watched as the vehicles got closer. He heard the roar of engines being pushed beyond their limits. Making a decision, John moved the rifle and op
ened the back seat. He pulled out a compact rocket launcher and readied it to fire. He took a quick look at Karen.

  “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me to,” she yelled at him, engaging the clutch and the brake holding the vehicle in place.

  John went down on one knee with the weapon over his shoulder. He waited until Jack’s Range Rover shot past, closely followed by the troop carrier. As he expected, all eyes in the pursuing vehicles were on Madeleine and Jack. He engaged the ready switch of the preloaded rocket launcher, sighted and fired with practiced ease. The missile shot out, impacting the front of the troop carrier, slightly behind the gun turret. The heat seeking warhead exploded, causing the vehicle to tumble violently end over end, scattering men and munitions in pieces. John leapt into the passenger seat just as Karen shot forward.

  “Go right for him,” John yelled, gesturing towards the enemy Jeep still firing on Madeleine and Jack.

  Madeleine watched as the troop carrier broke apart, smashed by a vicious explosion.

  “John got him,” Madeleine yelled in Jack’s direction.

  “Let’s finish this bastard!” Jack shouted, swinging his speeding vehicle in a widening arch as John sped up from the rear. From their speeding vehicles, John, Madeleine and Wiesel ripped into the remaining Jeep with an avalanche of fire. John fired out of the passenger window of Karen’s Range Rover, a phosphorous round from his weapon struck the Jeep’s gas tank. It exploded as the chemical coating of John’s bullet ignited the volatile fuel in the tank.