by Dick Stivers
Katz watched the Egyptian liaison officer cross the vast concrete-and-steel vault of the hangar. Speaking for an instant with a soldier, Sadek went to a non-com’s desk, dialed a number.
“Does he know of the flight?” Katz-alias-Steiner asked Parks.
“Mr. Steiner, I did as you asked. He doesn’t know. But let me tell you, Sadek isn’t the spy. He didn’t have to help Hershey. He ran out in that street. My men didn’t have the guts to do what he did. He’s a good man, a professional. Being an Egyptian doesn’t make him a fanatic.”
Across the hangar, Sadek took notes from what he heard on the telephone. Katz calculated the cost of the Egyptian secret police officer’s fashionable suit, his English wing tips, the gold wristwatch. The CIA file on Sadek described him as the only son of an alcoholic poet. Though his father died early, the boy had not suffered. His wealthy relatives showered money and gifts on him. His father’s older brother had paid for private schools in Egypt, then English universities. Another uncle held open a vice-presidency in the family’s lucrative import concern for the time when the young officer retired from government service.
“If I had not read his dossier,” Katz commented, “I would question how a civil servant could live as he does.”
“I went to his grandfather’s estate. For a high society reception. The man doesn’t have to work. He works because he wants to serve his country and his people. Save your time, don’t even bother investigating him. I trust the man with my life.”
*
As the taxi rolled to a stop at a restaurant’s service entrance, four men stepped out and slipped into the shadows. The taxi pulled away and disappeared into traffic. Surrounded by barrels of garbage and trash, the three Americans and their driver looked like wandering tourists. Their sports coats concealed their radios and shoulder-holstered autopistols. Mohammed concealed an Uzi and several mags in an equipment bag. They carried no other gear or weapons.
Without a word, Lyons led them through the alley’s darkness. He pointed to a truck, then to the apartment balconies above the alley. The apartments had European-style fire escapes, the steel landings doubling as balconies. Flowerpots and planter boxes covered the landings. The other men nodded. Lyons stepped up onto the parked truck’s bumper and climbed to the top of the cargo van. He tested the ladder, then went up quickly, his neoprene-soled shoes silent on the rungs.
Glancing into the lighted interior of the second-floor apartment as he passed, he saw a middle-aged man and woman watching a black-and-white television. He continued up. In the next apartment, two teenage girls danced to a loud Elvis Presley song. The girls whirled and spun like bobby-soxers in an old American Bandstand show.
Lyons stopped on the last rungs to scan the rooftop. He saw vent pipes and antennas silhouetted against the distant lights of high-rise towers. But Lyons could see nothing in the darkness of the black tar roof. He snaked over the top, crouching in the darkness.
He unhooked his hand radio from his belt. “I’m on top. Waiting for you.” Then Lyons spoke to Zaki in the taxi waiting on a side street. They had sent Abdul back to the garage to dump the prisoners. “Taximan. You monitoring?”
“Yes, sir. I’m parked and monitoring.”
“When Abdul gets back, have him wait where you left us. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
The steel ladder vibrated with steps. In seconds, Blancanales swung over the wall, followed by Gadgets and Mohammed. Waiting for their eyes to adjust, they listened. City noises and snatches of music came from the streets below. A ventilator fan grated in its housing. The smells of cooking oils and cigarettes swirled around them. After a minute, they could see gray shapes and the lines of wires within the darkness.
Moving again, Lyons crouchwalked toward the roof of the adjoining building. He felt his way past the guy wires of antennas, his eyes continuously sweeping the shadows and forms ahead of him for the movement of a sentry. He heard only the faint cracking of dust and grit under his shoes.
At the edge of the roof, Lyons waited again as the three shadows caught up with him. They peered over the low wall to the next building. A stereo played loudly beneath them. The roof vibrated with the beat of the music.
The bricks of the two apartment buildings met. There was no airspace or easement between the walls. Scanning the next roof, Able Team and friend saw another expanse of shadows and darkness. The captured mullah had told them that the next building over housed the Muslim Brotherhood group.
“There has to be someone standing guard up here,” Blancanales whispered to Lyons.
“That old man jived us,” Gadgets grunted.
“Maybe.” Lyons gouged a bit of asphalt from the roof, flicked it.
A dog barked, once, twice, then went quiet. They heard the feet of other dogs running across the roof, then more barking. The dogs whined, became silent.
Lyons tapped Blancanales and Gadgets. “I’m making a noise on the far side, then we go over. Berettas…”
Searching through the darkness with his fingers, Lyons found another hunk of asphalt. To avoid silhouetting himself against the sky, he crept over the roof to a fan housing and stood up with the bulk of the housing behind him. He watched the far building for almost a minute. Watching for movement. Then he hissed to the others and heaved the asphalt high over the rooftops.
The four men went over the low wall and ran across baked asphalt and sheet metal to the far side of the apartment building. The dogs barked. A voice shouted. Lyons saw his partners and Mohammed slink away through the antennas and vents. A tangle of barbed wire stopped them.
Barking continued on the opposite side of the roof. The four men spread out along the fence of planks and barbed wire. They knew the security fence would have gates. The group inside the building would have provided for rooftop escape.
Blancanales went slowly, feeling ahead of him for booby traps or noise-making trash. He peered up at the barbed wire, then moved along, fingers sweeping over the gritty surface. He found a bottle, then another, set them far to the side. His fingers found something soft, coarse, like burlap. He felt the shape of it. A dead rat.
He set the stiff, sun-dried rodent where he could find it, resumed his search for the gate. He located a loop of chain and a lock that secured a rectangle of old lumber set between two planks. Crawling backward, he picked up the rat, went back to Gadgets.
“Gate’s down there,” Blancanales whispered, his mouth close enough to touch Gadgets’s hair. “It’s got a lock.”
“On my way. Two clicks on the radio when you want me to open the gate.”
Blancanales continued to Lyons and Mohammed. “The Wizard’ll open the gate.”
The creaking of a door stopped his whisper. Footsteps crossed the roof. The three men froze in their crouches as the footsteps passed on the other side of the low wall. While the dogs continued barking, the sentry walked a circuit of the other rooftop. A voice shouted in Arabic at the dogs. The dogs trailed off, then one dog barked again, then all the dogs joined in. The sentry shouted once more. A bottle broke. The dogs scattered, finally went quiet.
The footsteps returned to the stairwell, and the door creaked closed. Footsteps went down stairs.
“Give the Wizard two clicks,” Blancanales whispered. “I’ll toss the next distraction.”
Lyons keyed his hand radio twice. Blancanales threw the rat to the far side of the other building’s roof. The dogs broke into another fury of barking. Paws scratched on tar as they ran to investigate the bait, snarling and yelping. When they found it, the noise got nastier.
“What the hell did you throw?” Lyons asked.
“A dead rat. The dogs are fighting with each other to rip it up. Now’s the time…”
The footsteps ran up the stairs. The door opened. Lyons and Blancanales thumbed back the hammers of their autopistols, then eased up.
In the light from the open door, they saw a bearded middle-aged man rush at the dogs. An Uzi hung from his shoulder. Lyons and Blancanales bra
ced their pistols on the wall to sight on the bearded sentry’s chest.
“Wait till he’s in there with the dogs…” Blancanales whispered to Lyons.
The sentry waved a flashlight at the dogs, started kicking them. Dogs yelped, ran away whining. The flashlight found a ragged scrap of rat. The sentry poked at it with his foot.
“Sighting in…” Lyons hissed. “Hit him!”
Slugs zipped through the air, a 9mm slug slapping the sentry’s jacket, a .45 ACP hollowpoint slamming him back into the crisscrossed barbed wire behind him. Two more slugs bounced him off the wire. He fell flat on the black asphalt, did not move as the dogs ran circles around him, sniffing at the blood.
Lyons spoke into his radio. “Wizard! You through that gate?”
“It’s open. What about the dogs?”
“We’ll do it.” Lyons turned to Blancanales. “Gate’s open, but first we waste those dogs. There’s no other way. We have to do it. Survival of whoever’s fittest to take the grief.”
Methodically, Blancanales executed the dogs, his underpowered 9mm subsonic slugs striking with less sound than a slap. Lyons watched over the phosphor dots of his Colt’s sights. What he saw was more cruel, somehow, than the killing of men. And more sad. Able Team killed only the bad, and often, sadly, the bad were dumb.
“Goddamn it,” Blancanales cursed. He jammed a new mag into the Beretta.
“Forget it, just forget it,” Lyons whispered to him, knowing what his friend felt. “We had to. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was them or us. Now let’s move it.”
As the three men dashed for the gate, other men sprinted up the stairs to the roof. Flashlight beams swept the rooftop and the barbed wire, catching the two Americans and the Egyptian.
Kalashnikov fire ripped the night.
9
Stepping through the gate in the barbed-wire barrier, Gadgets heard boots hammer the stairs. As he raised his radio to warn his partners, autofire shattered the silence. He fell flat on the roof and slipped out his Beretta.
Gunmen ran across the roof firing Kalashnikovs and Uzis. Gadgets saw the shadowy forms of his partners disappear behind the cover of the brick walls. The gunmen advanced, firing continuously, slugs sparking with the brick, chips of bricks and mortar flying. The barbed-wire fence jerked and swayed as bullets hit the wire, splintered the supports. Gadgets crawled to the cover of a roof fan. He leveled the Beretta.
Shouts in Arabic stopped the rifle fire. A gunman looked over the low wall dividing the roofs of the two apartment buildings. His head jerked back as a silent .45-caliber slug smashed through his face, his skull exploding as bursts of slugs pierced the darkness.
A gunman set down his Uzi and dug into the thigh pocket of his military-style pants. Over the night-glowing sights of his silenced autopistol, Gadgets watched the gunman’s silhouette make the motion of pulling a grenade’s safety pin. The silhouette stepped forward, an arm arcing back for the throw.
Three 9mm steel-cored slugs ripped through his shoulder and head. The dying man dropped the grenade as he staggered backward and collapsed. The Muslim terrorists turned to their fallen comrade. One man shouted to the others. Their weapons went silent for an instant as the gunmen dived away.
Thousands of steel fragments shredded them in mid-motion. A pause followed the blast, then the moans and cries began. Gadgets crept backward, retreating from the rooftop.
Lyons and Blancanales leaped through the gate, called out, “Wizard!”
“Where are you?”
“Here!”
“Move it!” Lyons rushed past him, the modified Colt Government Model held out at arm’s length, firing round after round as he found targets in the tangle of wounded terrorists.
“Hey!” Gadgets shouted. “Time to get out of here.”
Then Blancanales ran past, his Beretta showering brass on Gadgets. Taximan Mohammed followed, Uzi in hand, the bag of thirty-round magazines swinging on his right arm.
Gadgets saw Lyons change Colt mags, snap a shot into the head of a wounded man, take the man’s Uzi. Then he was firing bursts down the stairs.
Gadgets ran to join his partners.
At the head of the stairway, Lyons emptied the Uzi into the terrorists on the landing below. Dropping the empty magazine, he returned to the dead gunmen sprawled on the roof to find another loaded Uzi, then another. Blancanales grabbed a bloody AK, snapped shots down the stairs.
“There’s no ammunition,” Lyons shouted to Blancanales. “We surprised them; so they grabbed their rifles and ran up here. Check the sentries…”
Ripping open the pockets of one man, Blancanales found a grenade. He flipped over other corpses and found a belt pouch with two Uzi mags.
“Sixty rounds, plus whatever’s in the guns. And this…” He held up the grenade.
A gunman lurched up, lashing at Blancanales with a knife. Lyons pointed the Uzi at the wounded man. Blancanales kicked the terrorist in the gut, doubling him over, then kicked him in the back of the head. The man arced back in wide-eyed agony. Blancanales grabbed the knife, stomped down on the terrorist’s throat twice. Blood frothed.
“Ready to go?” Blancanales asked, slipping the knife under his belt. He hooked a finger through the safety pin ring of the grenade.
Lyons nodded. Mohammed and Gadgets ran up, Mohammed snatching a glance downstairs. He snapped off a burst. A death-scream ripped the night.
“There’s one for Maha’alot,” they heard the “Egyptian” say, his expression grim, out of character for the comic taxi driver he claimed to be. Then his manic grin returned. “Let’s go, cowboys. Corral full of snakes down there.”
Jerking the pin out of the grenade, Blancanales let the lever fly free and threw the frag down the stairway. The heavy thud puffed dust.
Lyons and Blancanales disappeared into the swirling cloud, their feet quick but silent on the blood-splashed stairs. Gadgets braced his Beretta against a railing as he watched for targets. Mohammed waited a second, then crept down the stairs.
The stairs opened to a hallway. Blancanales glanced in one direction, snatched his head back as slugs shrieked past. Lyons searched the several corpses at the foot of the stairs, looped the sling of a second Uzi over his left shoulder, pocketed several Uzi magazines. He snapped out a loaded banana mag for an AK and tossed it to Blancanales.
Pointing in the direction of the autofire, Blancanales shouted, “I’ll draw fire, you hit them.”
“Forget that! I’ll get Muslim volunteers.”
“What?”
“Mo-man, help me here!”
With the help of the taxi driver, he lifted a dead terrorist upright and heaved the standing corpse forward.
Autofire from both ends of the hall ripped past the body, one jerking an arm, another spraying gore from its chest. Squatting low, Blancanales sighted on a scarf-wrapped head and punched a 7.62mm hole through the woman’s head. She flew back, still alive, her hands clutching at the wound in her skull. Hands grabbed her to drag her out of the line of fire. Blancanales waited until the man exposed a shoulder, then put a slug through his body. The man rolled into the open, and a second slug smashed through his head.
Lyons lay on the floor, squinting through the Uzi’s peep-sight, watching a doorway. He saw an exposed arm. He waited. An AK muzzle appeared, then eyes looking for a target. Lyons flicked the trigger, two 9mm rounds pocking the man’s forehead. Brains splashed plaster, a rifle held in a dead hand clattered on the hallway tiles.
“Mo-man,” Lyons called out. “Another volunteer!”
The “Egyptian” struggled with the deadweight of a second bloody corpse, finally dropping it. “This one crawls…” He shoved the corpse over the smooth tiles with his foot.
Blancanales and Lyons watched both ends of the hall. No terrorists showed themselves.
An arm appeared from a doorway, Lyons fired, but…
“Grenade!” Lyons screamed.
Blancanales and Mohammed ducked down. Lyons saw the olive-drab cy
linder hit the tiles, bounce down the stairway alcove. He ducked, cupped his hands over his ears.
Plaster fell from the ceiling and walls, dust clouded up the stairwell. Lyons dashed for the door from where the grenade had come, screaming like a dying man, an Uzi in each hand.
A teenage girl, a mad smile on her face, looked into his eyes, took bursts in the face and chest as Lyons rushed her. He kicked the dying girl aside, sprayed fire into another terrorist behind her.
Lyons surveyed the room. Nothing moved. Stacks of heavy crates lined the walls; words stenciled in Russian and Arabic identified the contents. He saw a curtained closet, glanced under the curtains, saw sandaled feet. He fired a burst. An old man fell out, screaming, holding a gut wound. Lyons fired once into the mullah’s head.
Firing continued in the hallway. Lyons let the Uzi hang by its strap to key his hand radio. “This room’s clear. Can you break out?”
“We got two rifles at the other end, we’d risk…”
“Don’t. I’ll try something.”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you when I know.”
Throwing back the lids of the shipping crates, Lyons found Kalashnikov rifles in one case, hundreds of AK magazines in another, then a crate of RPG rockets and launchers. Wasting precious seconds, he continued searching, hoping to find some of the SAM-7 missiles responsible for downing the Air Force jet.
He found no antiaircraft missiles. He reopened the crate of RPGs, loaded a launcher. He went to the corpses and checked their pockets. He buzzed his partners. “I got two frags. I’ll bounce them past you. Make your move after the second one, I’ll cover…”
“Do it!” Gadgets shouted the length of the hall. “Stop talking! We got to get out of here!”
A grenade bounced past Gadgets, continued to the end of the hall. Covering his ears, Gadgets crouched down beside Mohammed. The blast ricocheted tiny bits of steel off the ceiling and walls and floor. The rifle fire started up again.
