by Dick Stivers
Switching off their headlights, the drivers of the three vehicles drove by the white flares.
The Land Rover shot through the pall of smoke.
Seconds behind, the Mercedes troop truck bumped over the broken asphalt. Then a mortar exploded behind the truck, and dirt and rocks and iron pocked the wooden slats. A scrape appeared in the cab in front of Lyons.
From a rise to the north approximately three hundred meters away, a rocket launcher flashed, and an instant later the RPG warhead passed behind the Rover and exploded in a long streak on the earth. Powell answered with 40mm grenades, firing single grenades to find the range, then dropping a burst of alternating high-explosive and white phosphorous grenades on the position. Lyons sighted the Browning and raked the ridge with .50-caliber slugs as the Shias behind him fired bursts from their PKM machine guns. Tracers from the ridge and the convoy crossed.
One sparking point moved. An automatic weapon fired from a vehicle, the line of tracers going wild as the vehicle bumped and lurched over a rutted track. Another flare burst into white glare and Lyons saw a Japanese truck speeding for the highway in an attempt to cut them off. A soldier fired a pedestal-mounted machine gun from the back of the truck.
Lyons swung the Browning around and fired. The first burst went low, and a single tracer skipped off the rocks, pinwheeling away into the storm clouds. Adjusting his aim, Lyons saw a tracer disappear into the truck. He held down the Browning's button and counted out ten rounds.
The truck veered to the right and overturned. Powell sighted on the overturned truck and fired a 3-shot burst of 40mm, hitting it with high-explosive, white phosphorous, then high ex again. Spilled gasoline sheetflamed.
Returning his aim to the ridge, Powell fired for area effect. High-ex flashes and white chemical fire splashed the ridge, than a ball of orange petroleum flame surged into the sky as he hit another vehicle.
Lyons saw the silhouettes of a mortar crew and sighted the Browning. A red line of tracers touched the silhouettes. Powell found the crew with a 40mm burst.
No more mortars came. Individual riflemen fired on the convoy, slugs intermittently punching into the wood sidings of the troop truck. All the firing stopped as they left the ambush behind.
Lyons covered the Browning, then glanced back to the Shia militiamen. In the dying flarelight, the leather-faced, middle-aged men grinned and gave Lyons the V for victory. Lyons keyed his hand-radio. "Everyone okay?"
"No problems here," Blancanales responded. "Anyone know who fired at us?"
"You mean," Powell answered, "did we take names? Fuck, no. Ain't killing them good enough?"
"We didn't even get a shot off!" Gadgets complained. "Our guns only cover the road..."
"Hey, Wizard," Powell drawled in his true East Texas dialect. "You just wait. I think you'll get your chance. Any minute now."
* * *
A kilometer past Kahhale, a Lebanese army armored personnel carrier blocked the highway. A soldier with a flashlight told the Palestinian drivers of the vans to return to Beirut. Other soldiers manned the machine guns of the APC. Zhgenti did not challenge the orders. He told the drivers to find a way around the roadblock.
A few minutes later, as the vans bumped over a dirt sideroad, Zhgenti cursed. "Storms, revolutions, whores and pretty little soldiers — I must kill those Americans and the world is against me. My superiors will not listen to excuses. What a mess. What a sorry mess this is!"
"Illovich is the one," Desmarais snapped back at the Soviet. "He had them prisoner. He wanted a propaganda event. What a dreamer that old man is. I said he must kill them while he had them because they were vile, tricky, fascist bastards who'd do anything, stop at nothing..."
"Not like you, eh?" Zhgenti leered. "My tricky little Canadian."
The vans came to a village devastated by artillery. No lights showed from the windows of the remaining houses. Nothing moved on the streets of frozen mud. As the vans followed the narrow road, their headlights illuminated pathetic vignettes: bundles of rags and stiff hands, staring faces beneath shrapnel-pocked walls; a Syrian army truck that had taken a direct hit, scorched corpses and skeletons hanging from the flame-blackened hulk; a peasant wagon of belongings still hitched to a frozen mule.
A stout Muslim woman waved to them. Inside Zhgenti's van, rifle and submachine gun safeties clicked off. The woman, using an old blanket as a chador, stood at a crossroad. Behind her, a form wrapped in blankets lay on the snow. The woman ran wailing to the Zhgenti's van.
"Ask her which road will take us to the Bekaa," the Soviet told the driver.
The Palestinian shouted down her wailing. He questioned her repeatedly. Finally she pointed to the eastern road. The driver turned to Zhgenti.
"Her husband's wounded. She's begging us to take her to the highway. Or he'll die."
Zhgenti rolled down his window. Pointing an Uzi with one hand, he fired a burst into the blanket-wrapped old man. An arm reached up and clawed the air.
The old Muslim woman shrieked and beat at the van's door. Laughing, the Soviets and Palestinians fired point-blank into her face. She fell back and sat on the snow, blood gushing from enormous wounds to her head. Zhgenti leaned out and fired a long burst that spilled the old woman's brains. Smiling, displaying all the porcelain and stainless steel of his teeth, the Soviet turned to Desmarais. "Remember, my little French Canadian. Never let yourself forget that I am also a vile, vicious bastard who stops at nothing."
Shuddering with the horror, not opening her eyes, Desmarais answered. "I know, I will not forget."
* * *
Pretending to sleep, Lyons stayed low in the back of the troop truck. He held his Konzak assault shotgun under the blanket covering him.
The Syrians paced around the trucks and Rover. Lyons heard Powell talking in Arabic, followed by Arabic voices shouting back and forth, then boots hitting the road. Someone strode away — the boots splashed through the mud beside the asphalt, continued a few more steps. Powell had gone to the sandbagged bunker at the side of the highway.
Clicks came from his hand-radio but Lyons did not dare move a hand to return them, not while Syrian sentries surrounded them. Voices came from the bunker. Then the boots returned and the Rover's engine gunned. Hussein clashed the gears as he shifted and then the troop truck moved. Behind the truck, the diesel of the semi roared.
Lyons finally lowered the blanket from his face. Only dark hills and snow surrounded them. His hand-radio clicked again.
"How'd we get through that?" Gadgets asked.
"I don't know," Lyons told his partner. "I kept a blanket over my head. Ask the Marine. I heard him walk into the guardhouse and talk with someone."
Powell came on with a laugh. "Hey, don't get spooked. I told you this would be tight. It's just started, you hear me?"
"What went on in the guardhouse?" Lyons asked.
"The officer on duty questioned me. Wanted to know all about us. Why we'd risk being on the road tonight, why I, a Soviet, would be with the convoy and what was in the truck..."
"What'd you tell him?" Gadgets interrupted.
10
In the underground factory, Syrian technicians completed final checks of the Soviet BM-240mm rocket-firing systems. They shouted questions and answers to one another, some gathered around the cargo containers, others inside them. Senior technicians watched the digital displays of instruments that monitored the firing circuits.
Workers were moving everywhere in the factory. Mechanics checked the bolts securing the cargo containers to the flatbed trailers. Clerks passed the workbenches to inventory machines and tools. Skiploaders moved crates from the workshops to the far walls, stacking them for later transport.
At the steel doors to the underground complex of offices and workshops, groups of soldiers with slung Kalashnikovs stood talking of the political war and the attack by the Muslim Brotherhood. As guards for the trucks, the soldiers would not begin their duties until the convoy of rockets left for America.
Col
onel Ali Dastgerdi directed every detail of the final assembly.
Now, in the last hours of the greatest project of his career, after years of work, Dastgerdi would not allow some petty distraction of a technician to rob him of victory. He stood behind the engineers as they compared the test impulses to the amperage specified in the manuals. He watched the electrical technicians check the conduits leading into the trailers. He climbed inside each flatbed trailer and checked the soldering of the firing wires to the fuses of the rockets.
With a workman's ladder, he went to the roofs of the containers and examined the bolts securing the aluminum sheeting to the side walls. Then he touched the release latches to confirm the lubrication of the moving parts.
Nothing could go wrong. He could not accompany the rockets from the underground factory. He could not travel through the Bekaa to the Mediterranean, then to the mid-Atlantic, where the crane ship from Nicaragua would transfer the containers to a freighter for the final segment of the trip to the United States. He could not ride in the trucks transporting the rockets to the capital of the United States.
Every one of thousands of details must be perfect. No qualified personnel would be in the trucks or on the freighters to correct last-minute failures.
From the moment the rockets left the underground factory, the transportation and deployment would be in the hands of untrained and unqualified terrorists, Islamic radicals — Iranians, Lebanese, American Black Muslims — who believed they waged sacred war for the Ayatollah Khomeini. The ignorant, suicidal fanatics could be trusted only to die.
But every possible malfunction had been anticipated.
Simple bolts secured the aluminum roofs of the cargo containers. Before the trucks carried the containers the last few kilometers to the District of Columbia, the drivers needed only to remove the bolts to prepare for the firing. Then, the release of one latch allowed the roofs to be torn away in the wind, creating a 120 KPH launch vehicle for the rockets.
Duplicate circuits ensured the firing of the rockets. When the unit leader confirmed the transmission of the homing signals, the leader had simply to check the distance from the inauguration, then initiate the firing.
Aluminum-and-plastic-foam antishock cases protected redundant solid-state firing circuits. If damage in transit rendered a pulse generator inoperative, an exact duplicate, wired in parallel, performed the firing.
If American security forces broke the terrorist group responsible for truck-launching the rockets, the action would not defeat the strike. An alternative group stood by to transport the containers up the Potomac as cargo and launch the rockets when they received the homing signals.
Soviet agents in America had distributed the homing-impulse transmitters to ten infiltrators. Though each infiltrator — whether UNESCO bureaucrat, Brazilian professor, New York debutante or limousine chauffeur — thought himself or herself a lone operator, ten would attend the inauguration of the President of the United States.
The infiltrators did not know they would die in a rain of rockets. They had been told the small electronic units monitored and recorded the informal UHF communications of the Presidential staff. Some believed the recordings would be forwarded to newspapers, others that the recordings would be used to embarrass the President.
If the American secret service — by some fantastic blessing of luck — intercepted one or two or five of the infiltrators and confiscated the minitransmitters, it did not matter. The transmitters of the other five infiltrators would guide the rockets to the inauguration. If only one of the ten infiltrators penetrated American security, the one transmitter would be sufficient to guide the rain of Soviet missiles onto the assembly of America's elite.
Following the impulses to the inauguration, the missiles would rain doom upon the President and all the other representatives of America, the doom of high explosives and white phosphorous and nerve gases.
To create prime-time terror for a national viewing audience. To create national rage beyond reason.
The surviving political leaders would not restrain the demands for revenge. No politician would preach restraint or forgiveness. No one could speak against a devastating counterstrike on Iran. America would answer Islamic terror with war.
And the Soviet Union, under the terms of the 1926 mutual defense treaty with Iran, would rush its armored divisions to the rescue of its southern neighbor. America's revenge would create the Soviet Republic of Iran.
Satisfied with the work of his technicians and staff, Colonel Dastgerdi approached the officer heading the detachment of Syrian troops. "When can we leave?"
The Syrian smiled and shrugged. "Only God knows."
"What kind of answer is that?"
"It is all very confused. Our forces face the traitorous forces of the..."
"Don't recite propaganda to me!" Dastgerdi indicated the trucks and flatbed trailers bearing the containers with a sweep of his arm. "These must be transported through the madness."
"True, Colonel. It is madness in the night. The fanatics of the Brotherhood wage war against our country. They strike everywhere. It is terrible."
"When will they be destroyed? Spare me the repeating of what they broadcast. When can this cargo move?"
"Only God knows. Perhaps minutes, perhaps days. The word will come."
* * *
Zhgenti cursed. After hours of racing through the twisting, ice-slick mountain roads, the vans came to another checkpoint. Here, on the eastern slopes of the Jabal el-Knisse, where the highway led down into the Bekaa, the Syrian army stopped all traffic.
Lines of troop trucks, freight trucks, civilian and military cars and tanks waited for clearance to continue. With a flashlight, Zhgenti checked a map for an alternative route. No roads bypassed the checkpoint.
"Go into the opposite lanes," Zhgenti told the Palestinian driver. "Get past all those trucks. Go up to the Syrians. We cannot wait here all night."
Swinging into the left-hand lane, the driver sped past other vehicles, then jammed on the brakes. Two Syrian soldiers stood in the glare of the headlights, their Kalashnikov rifles aimed at the van's windshield. An officer shouted and motioned the driver back.
"They will not allow it," the Palestinian told Zhgenti.
"Demand to speak to the officer in command. We have clearance for..."
A flash. An explosion rocked the van, the night suddenly a red dawn. Pieces of rock and metal rained down on the roof. Shells screamed down from the storm.
Vehicle chaos came an instant later. Trucks swerved into the open lane. Tanks left the asphalt and ground along the shoulder. Soldiers ran everywhere as shells continued to fall around the traffic jam.
"Drive!" Zhgenti shouted, beating on the driver's back.
The van rolled sideways, the shock of a blast shattering the windows, spraying the interior with thousands of cubes of tempered glass. Continuing through the sideways roll, they saw a ball of flame rising from what had been a truck.
Desmarais screamed as the van rolled. Then the van stopped on its roof and she crawled from the window, her overnight bag clutched in her hand. Standing in the swirling snow and the sudden day, she saw burning hulks and maneuvering vehicles. The wounded were dying under tires and tank treads. Leaking gasoline became streams of fire.
A long, wailing scream drowned out the engines and explosions and shouts. Desmarais realized the scream came from her own throat, as she stood upright in the flames and chaos and death.
Her legs responded to her panic with blind and unreasoning animal flight. Headlights and fire illuminated her path through the rocks and debris. Then came the body-numbing shock of another high-explosive blast, and she hit the asphalt. She ran again, her flight bag banging against her legs with every step.
A troop transport passed her. Brakes squealed, tires smoked as the truck slowed. Headlights behind her — the lights seemed to come from the sky — revealed the empty back of the transport. She threw herself over the boards. Behind her were the searing headlights of a hu
ge truck. Its roaring diesel engine drowned out her whimpering and the screams of the dying along the roadside.
Two soldiers looked across at her. In the back of the transport, the Syrians lay flat, exposing as little as possible of their bodies to the blast and shrapnel of the artillery barrage.
"Journalist!" she screamed, her voice cracking with panic. "Journalist! Journalist!" She repeated the word in French and Arabic. The soldiers ignored her.
The truck accelerated. Scenes of flames and darkness flashed past. A shock rocked the truck, splintered wood, showering her. She looked up to see that a shell fragment had slashed through a thick plank on one side. Tangled in the other slats, the plank shifted and bumped with the lurching of the truck. A soldier who sat against the truck's cab scrambled across the deck and shoved the splintered plank out.
Pausing for an instant, the soldier looked at her. A fur hat and a scarf covered his face, but she saw Caucasian skin and blue eyes. A Russian? He returned to his position near a heavy machine gun and wrapped a blanket around himself as the truck hurtled through the night.
Desmarais called in her basic Arabic to the two Syrian soldiers. "I am a journalist. I go to Damascus. You take me to Damascus?"
"Yes, we go there," one of the Shias replied, nodding.
"Thank you, thank you," she sobbed.
They left the carnage behind. Desmarais put her face to the dirty boards and gasped down breath after breath.
She had survived.
And she had left Zhgenti behind.
An arm's reach away from Desmarais, Carl Lyons whispered into his hand-radio. "We just picked up a hitchhiker. Guess who it is?"
The others heard him laughing.
* * *
Shouting, cursing, Zhgenti led his men through the wreckage. The Palestinians and Soviets of his kill squad had abandoned any pretense of representing a news network. They had taken their weapons and equipment and left the empty cases to burn in the wrecked vans. Now they moved through the flames and swirling snow, hurrying to the safety of the open highway.