Bloodstorm sts-13

by Keith Douglass

  They had landed in a small valley that had a water source of some kind to grow the crops. The surrounding hills were barren and desertlike, Murdock remembered from watching them as he came down.

  They moved over another fence, then through a ditch, and went to ground as Franklin waited at the side of the road. Time was the important factor now. It was 1920, which left them roughly eight hours to complete their mission or find someplace to hide out during the day.

  Franklin carried an MP-5 submachine gun. He waved two cars by in the glare of headlights. Then a small loaded truck went by. He stopped the next truck, holding the weapon in front of him but standing at the side of the road. He wasn’t going to risk getting run down by a wild-eyed Syrian driver.

  The truck stopped, and Franklin talked to the driver a moment, then ordered him out of the cab. It was a stake truck with canvas over the top, and would hold the whole squad.

  “How far to the next town?” Franklin asked in Arabic.

  “Five kilometers,” the driver answered.

  “How far to Damascus?”

  “Fifty kilometers.”

  “You live around here?”

  “Yes, next village.”

  Franklin put three silenced rounds from the sub gun through the man’s heart. The Syrian farmer jolted off the roadway into the ditch. Franklin hurried after him, took off his hat and light jacket, and then went back to the truck.

  Bravo Squad and guests were already inside, with DeWitt and Khai in the front seat.

  “Can you drive this thing?” DeWitt asked Franklin.

  “Can a duck fly?” He started the engine, pushed it into gear, and began backing up. The SEALs cheered. He ground the gears, found first, and moved forward.

  They crept through the village at a modest pace, found nothing to hinder them, and gunned the rig to a faster speed once past the lights.

  “Fuel?” DeWitt asked.

  Khai stared at the small panel of instruments. “One gauge, but I’m not sure if it says almost full or almost empty.” He pointed at it.

  “Almost full,” Franklin said.

  In the back of the truck, Kat moved next to Murdock. He had just cut a hole in the front of the canvas top so they could push the machine gun out and fire in case of trouble.

  “Murdock,” she said softly. “About the driver?”

  “Yes, an innocent man. But we couldn’t leave a witness to run to the Army about a group of ten who hijacked his truck. He’s a victim of war. His death could help save the lives of ten thousand people if Syria dropped that warhead on Haifa, Israel, say. I know when you look at it another way, it’s shocking. But we’re protecting our own backsides this way as well. We let him live, all ten of us could die before morning.”

  “I know, I know. I just had to hear you say it. Now, I’m all SEAL again.” He reached down and squeezed her hand. She clung to it. In the dark nobody could see.

  Two miles out of the village the land changed back to desert. Wind whipped sand across the highway, and in places small dunes had built up a foot of sand on the ancient blacktop. They kept driving. For twenty miles they saw no lights anywhere in the surrounding area.

  “Not a good place to run out of gas,” Franklin said. “Hope to hell I’m reading that gauge right.” Two autos passed them, whipping along at what Franklin said had to be seventy-five miles per hour. He kept the truck at a respectable fifty-five, and hoped the engine didn’t blow up.

  They came over a small rise and lights billowed ahead of them. The lights were situated well off the road, brilliantly illuminating some kind of facility.

  “Limestone quarry,” Franklin said. “They use a lot of limestone in buildings in some of their cities. We should be hitting more traffic now. They must have a rail line down here to move the stone to the north.”

  “Checkpoint ahead,” DeWitt said. “Looks like just one man beside a jeep. He’ll be on the driver’s side.” As they moved toward the checkpoint, they were sandwiched in between large closed truck trailers, moving slowly and evidently loaded.

  The man at the checkpoint noted the truck in front of them, talked to the driver a moment, and made a note on the paper on his clipboard and waved him by.

  The sentry had a revolver on a belt around his waist and the cap of an Army man. He only glanced at the farm truck, and waved it on through without a second look.

  Everyone in the truck relaxed, and the people in back stayed low and out of sight until they were well down the road.

  “Somebody from the quarry checking the goods coming out,” Khai said.

  Ahead they came to a wider, better road with signs. They could turn left or right. Khai studied the signs and when the truck was at the junction, he pointed to the left.

  “Swings around and keeps going north,” Khai said. “The sign says twenty-six kilometers to Damascus.”

  “Yeah, and that’s probably the outskirts of the place,” Franklin said. “How we going to find anybody in that big city?”

  “We ask questions,” DeWitt said. “When we get to the town, stop at the first little group of stores you see. You take the address inside, Franklin, and get directions to the street. Should work out well.”

  Five miles from Damascus, the traffic began to back up. Murdock looked out over the cab and saw the problem. He leaned under the canvas and yelled to Khai.

  “There’s a roadblock ahead. A real one. Looks like they’re checking cars and trucks and cargo. How about a side street?”

  They turned right at the next street, and a block down found a Syrian Army jeep parked sideways across the street. Two soldiers with rifles stood in front of the jeep.

  “I see them,” Murdock said. “I’ll take the one on my side. Ed, you take the other one. We pull up and stop and they will come one on each side. We do them and push the jeep out of the way and drive on through. No chance for radio use. Got it?” DeWitt had a silenced MP-5. In back, Murdock grabbed a suppressed MP-5 and held it close to the hole in the canvas top over the hood. The rig came to a stop ten yards in front of the jeep, where one of the soldiers held up his hand. Then the Syrian soldiers began walking toward the truck.

  Murdock pushed the MP-5 out the canvas and drilled three shots into the chest of the soldier on the left, slamming him backward into a quick death. At almost the same time, DeWitt shot the other soldier in the forehead with one round.

  Franklin saw the left-hand man go down, pushed on the gas, and hit the rear end of the Jeep with the truck’s left front bumper and jolted it out of the way. The truck rolled on through, down eight blocks, then over one, and back onto the main highway into town.

  They stopped three miles down the road, which was now engulfed with houses and small businesses and what had to be small manufacturing buildings.

  Franklin went into a food store, and came out a few minutes later with a sack of goods and a written note telling how to find the house they needed.

  They had been supplied with funny-looking paper money before they boarded the plane. They were Syrian pound notes in denominations of twenty, fifty, and one hundred. Fifty-eight Syrian pounds were worth one U.S. dollar.

  “Got the directions,” Franklin said, passing the sack over to DeWitt. “Also some delicious sweet rolls that look like cinnamon rolls, and taste ten times as good. Hang on.” They passed the rolls around. Khai leaned out and passed the sack to Ostercamp.

  Franklin drove like he knew where he was going. He made several turns, backed up once and went in the other direction, then came to an unpaved street and grinned.

  “Almost home to Mama,” he said. He noted house numbers, and parked at the side of the street in front of a house. It was what the natives called an Old House, Khai told them. “It’s made of unbaked bricks, often dried in the sun, and of wood and stone. Most of these are very old.”

  DeWitt and Khai left the truck and went to the rear of the house. They carried weapons, and hoped anyone watching in the darkness would mistake them for Syrian soldiers. At the rear of the house t
hey found a door with a bell. DeWitt rang it and stepped back, giving the play to Khai.

  A small panel in the door opened, and a face with two dark eyes looked out.

  “Yes?” the woman asked in Arabic.

  “We are looking for the one true believer.”

  The woman sucked in a breath, and they heard a bolt come free and latches open. Then the door swung outward, showing a shadowed narrow space. A woman in long flowing skirt and brilliantly colored blouse watched them with a frown.

  “Come in quickly,” she said in English. “Yes, you have found the right place. Get rid of the truck at once. Even though it is dark, bring in the others by twos. This side of the house. Then drive the truck down a mile and leave it. You stole it, right?”

  DeWitt nodded. “I’m DeWitt, miss. We’re grateful for your help.”

  “Hurry. If the neighbors see any of you, we all could die rather unpleasantly.”

  DeWitt went back to the truck, ushered the men inside, and told Franklin where to drive the truck and leave it.

  “No trouble so far,” DeWitt said. “Let’s keep it that way.”

  The men slipped through the nighttime shadows and around the house, then inside. Murdock watched the truck drive away slowly, then went inside himself.

  “Franklin should be back in fifteen minutes. Somebody keep the clock on him,” DeWitt said. He turned to the woman. “I understand we are to call you Yasmin, which isn’t your real name.”

  The woman was in her thirties, tall and graceful and a little on the full-figured side.

  “Yes, Yasmin it is. I will do what I can. My sources say the warhead is here, but we’re not exactly sure where.”

  “We’ll need to know an exact location before we can do much,” DeWitt said.

  They had moved into a room from the entrance, and some of the men sat and some stood. Yasmin glanced at them, and paused when she came to Kat.

  “One so young, he’s just a boy,” Yasmin said.

  Kat laughed. “Not so, Yasmin. I’m twenty-eight, and as you can hear, I’m not a boy.”

  Yasmin put both hands over her face. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I had no idea. Dressed this way…”

  “Yasmin, let me introduce you to Katherine Garnet,” DeWitt said. “Kat works for the U.S. government the way you do, only Kat is our scientific expert on nuclear warheads. The rest of us are just delivery boys bringing her here to do her extremely sensitive work.”

  Murdock looked at his watch. Franklin had been gone almost twenty-five minutes. Where was he?

  * * *

  Four blocks down the street, Franklin stared at the two Syrian soldiers who had stopped him moments before.

  “No one runs in Damascus unless they are criminals or enemies of Syria,” one of the soldiers told Franklin.

  Franklin looked at them, and saw two soldiers probably not out of their teens. They held their rifles slung over their shoulders and muzzles down.

  One of them motioned with his free hand. “Come on, we’re going to have to take you into headquarters if you won’t talk. You could tell us what branch of special Army teams you’re with, and we could let you go and finish our patrol. Going to be a lot of work for all of us.”

  Franklin understood every word they said in Arabic. He knew he had to do something fast. He just didn’t know what.

  28

  Franklin had kept the MP-5 with him when he drove the truck down the street away from the safe house. Now, facing the two Syrian soldiers, he carried the weapon in his right hand by the hand-piece with his finger on the trigger.

  He shrugged and screeched and pointed behind the two men. They turned to look, and he brought up the sub gun and sprayed the men with two bursts of three silenced rounds each. The soldiers went down, both dead or dying before they hit the ground.

  Franklin turned and ran down the street, the MP-5 in both hands and held in front of him. He finished the rest of the mile in record time, and went to the back door of the safe house as they had told him to do. J.G. DeWitt stood there outside waiting for him.

  “Any problems?” DeWitt asked.

  “Two,” Franklin said. “Couple of Syrian soldiers came out of nowhere and stopped me coming back from the truck.”

  He told the J.G. what happened, and they hurried inside and Franklin told their host.

  Yasmin frowned when she heard the story. “This will make problems. What you must do is go back to the truck, put the bodies inside, and drive it five miles down the street. Then come back here. It is the only way. Otherwise we would have soldiers all over this area asking questions, looking for strangers.”

  “Franklin, you’re up. You know where the bodies and the truck are,” DeWitt said. “Take Jefferson with you. Then get back here without attracting any more attention.”

  The two men picked up their weapons and hurried out the door.

  “There’s not much we can do tonight,” Yasmin said. “I know, you want to do the job and get away, but it can’t happen yet. I’m meeting two people tomorrow morning who should have some intel about where the Army has the warhead. Best I can do. Your men can sleep upstairs. Two rooms with mattresses on the floor. Not the best accommodations.”

  “We’ve slept on lots worse,” DeWitt said.

  “Any idea at all where the warhead might be?” Murdock asked. “Would it be on an Army base, here in town, out in the country somewhere they consider safe?”

  Yasmin nodded. “Oh, yes, we know a little. It was flown here by commercial jet and taken at once to military headquarters near the edge of town. They were so afraid of it that they ordered it moved to a safe place until they could get engineers in to look it over and convert it into a drop bomb. My source said the top Army brass were almost paralyzed with fear of the warhead. They are afraid it might suddenly trigger itself and explode and kill most of the people in Damascus.”

  “So where did they move it?” DeWitt asked.

  Yasmin sighed. “That, my friends, is what we have to find out. My sources say it must have been taken to one of two locations. Both are well outside of the city, but they are in opposite directions, so we must stay here.”

  “We’ll do whatever we can,” Murdock said.

  Yasmin smiled. “Yes, I have been instructed. But you must be tired. The men can sleep upstairs. The lady will be with me. There are two beds in my room. Oh, I’m sorry. You also must be hungry. I have been stocking up on food.”

  “The men will be fine, Yasmin,” Murdock said. “Something in the morning would be good. We know this is a lot of trouble for you. We and the government appreciate it.”

  Yasmin sat in a chair, and the two officers and Kat sat nearby.

  “Yes, a bit of a problem,” Yasmin said, “but that’s why I’m here. I am a Syrian, but I grew up in Philadelphia. I’ve been here for eight years now, doing what I can. My cover is to teach math in one of the schools. My… my husband was also working with me for the Company, but he was killed three years ago in an operation that went sour. He was not suspected, just an unfortunate who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “No one suspects what you do?” DeWitt asked.

  “So far. But I have been deep cover with no activity at all for the past two years. Now I have a chance to help. Yes, I am a trained field agent, as was my husband. We wanted to do something to help bring better relations between the Arab world and the West. We’re not sure that we have.”

  “Every little bit helps,” Murdock said. “If we can find that warhead and destroy it, we may be saving the lives of a hundred thousand people. That would be a real contribution.”

  Yasmin’s eyes widened. “So many? I heard that the bomb in Chad killed almost thirty thousand. Unthinkable. How could the Russians let such a weapon loose on the world?”

  “To our best understanding, the weapon had been stored and hidden in Ukraine, formerly part of Russia, now an independent nation,” DeWitt said. “The government there probably didn’t sell the missile. It probably went into the hands of an u
nscrupulous person who sold it to the Chinese.”

  “That helps me a little. At least a government didn’t loose this terror. Tomorrow morning I will be up early to go meet with my source. I can’t use the telephone. They are closely monitored. I am somewhat suspect since the government knows I was born in the U.S., but it’s routine and thousands of people are monitored. I will be gone when you get up.”

  Jefferson and Franklin came in, both breathing hard. Franklin looked at DeWitt and gave a curt nod.

  “Mission accomplished, J.G. We drove her six miles more and parked it in a lot with a bunch of other rigs.”

  “No problems coming back?”

  “No, sir. All is cool,” Jefferson said. “We uptight or on the pad?”

  “Some sleeping places upstairs,” DeWitt said. “Better hit them. We don’t know what’s up for tomorrow.”

  The two men vanished up a stairway that Yasmin pointed to.

  Yasmin stared at Kat for a moment. “I think it’s time for bed for everyone. Kat, that bandage on your leg probably needs to be changed. Let’s go in and take a look.” She waved at the men. “Stay up as long as you want to. Just turn out the lights when you go upstairs.”

  They did.

  Murdock came awake at 0530 as usual. He had slept fully dressed, except for his boots, as the rest of the men did. He put on his boots, and saw that Ed DeWitt was up and staring out a window.

  “She left in a black sedan about an hour ago,” DeWitt said. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “How far do you think they took the warhead?” Murdock asked.

  “Forty miles the other side of the suburbs,” De Witt said. “Figures. The government guys must be scared shitless by the hellish device.”

  “Might work to our advantage,” Murdock said. “Might mean they wouldn’t protect it with a lot of men, just some buildings and concrete and maybe a mine shaft. They do any mining here?”

  “Not much. Some asphalt, gypsum, and phosphate.”

  “Hope they don’t stick it down a mine somewhere.”

  An hour later downstairs, they discovered a woman in the kitchen ready to make breakfast. Franklin said she’d told him she was “cook” and was ready for their orders.