by Dick Stivers
Sadek stepped out, held the door open for Katz and Parks. In the alley, they saw the floodlights of emergency vehicles. Shadowy forms moved in the glowing haze. Firemen directed streams of water onto the smoking hulk of truck.
A plainclothes security man, his Kalashnikov slung over his back, hurried to Sadek, saluted. They spoke quickly, the security man shaking his head, pointing to the street.
“He says there are hazards in the alley. We must enter through the front.”
They hurried around the corner, passed restaurants with tables covered with abandoned meals, coffee shops littered with fallen plaster and broken cups. Shopkeepers pulled steel grates across their shattered windows.
Sadek briefed his American associates. “Twenty or more dead. Witnesses tell of a gunfight, then many explosions. Finally, the great explosion in the alley. My officers reported finding extremist literature in the rooms.”
“Muslim Brotherhood?” Katz asked.
“No. Palestinian. My country offers refuge to brother Arabs. Sometimes our brothers abuse our trust.”
Paramilitary officers in fatigues and helmets stood aside as Sadek led his associates up the stairs. The younger Sadek and Parks took the stairs two at a time, leaving the limping Katz behind. He glanced ahead, saw another paramilitary trooper, a barrel-chested officer in a beret, stop Sadek and Parks.
Speaking with Sadek, the officer swept his eyes up and down Parks, then Katz as he limped to the landing. Katz saw the officer’s lip arch with a sneer. Then the young man saluted Sadek and paced away.
“He told me they have not yet removed or even covered the bodies,” said Sadek. “It is not a sight for weak stomachs, he told me.”
“I’ve seen everything.” Parks dismissed the words with a casual wave of his hand. “And I’m sure Mr. Steiner has seen more.”
Parks ran up the next flight of stairs, slipped and fell in coagulated blood. He jumped back, gasping.
Debris that had been a human body littered the stairs. A blast had sprayed the wall with blood, left the pearl-pink of shattered skull on the old tile steps. Parks turned his face away, continued carefully up the stairs, passing a white-smocked orderly in elbow-high plastic gloves. Katz and Sadek followed Parks.
Soldiers and investigators moved through the ruins of the apartment building’s third floor. Orderlies laid bodies on plastic-sheeted stretchers. Two young men argued over an arm, one orderly pointing to a mangled corpse on a stretcher, the other shaking his head. They resolved the argument by putting the arm in approximate position on the gory corpse, found it did not match, and slung it into a bag.
Walking through the hall, Katz glanced into a room. He saw a poster of Khomeini. He picked up a pamphlet, leafed through it. The writer preached annihilation of Christians, Jews, deviate Muslims — but only the men and male children; the women and girls would be used for the pleasure of the warriors. Yakov Katzenelenbogen threw the literature to the floor in disgust; Phoenix Force’s senior member was to a degree hardened against bloodshed, but he found sick ideas forever repugnant.
Katz followed a few steps behind Sadek, watching the well-groomed and modishly dressed officer step over blood and gore to avoid staining his English wing tips.
Sadek spoke with a soldier, then turned to Katz. “There was fighting on the roof. We should go there.”
Following the bloody stairs into the smoke-hazed midnight, they coughed as the slight wind blew drifts of soot and smoke past them.
“Where is Mr. Parks?” Sadek asked.
Katz glanced back down the stairs. “I don’t know.”
“Perhaps his stomach…”
They smiled at their friend’s discomfort. Katz never took his attention from the Egyptian. He stayed at Sadek’s side, watching him, noting the small details the man noted. He saw Sadek wave a flashlight over dead dogs, then several corpses. The flashlight’s beam held on wounds. A few steps farther, Sadek found brass casings.
Taking an envelope from his jacket pocket, he scooped up two 9mm casings. He found a .45-caliber casing, picked it up with the point of a pen, studied it for a moment. Then that shell went into the envelope.
“Steiner! Steiner!” A voice called out. Returning to the stairs, Katz saw Parks waving him down.
As Katz limped down to the landing, Parks blurted out, “We’re in motion at the airport, sir! We got an investigation. It’s a whole new ball game.”
Nodding, Katz glanced around them, saw three Egyptians within earshot. At the head of the stairs, he heard Sadek speaking in Arabic with a plainclothes officer. Katz heard Sadek instruct the officer to “…take the shell casings to the laboratory.”
Katz pointed to the silver rod of an antenna that stuck out of the coat pocket of Parks’s suit.
“Your driver radioed the message?”
“Yes, just this minute. My men are following a suspect…”
“Is that radio scrambler-equipped?”
“This?” Parks held up the radio. He looked at the switches, turned the radio in his hand as if looking for printed specifications. “I don’t know…”
11
Breaking down the modified Colt Government Model, Lyons examined it for damage or unusual wear. He released the magazine and thumbed out the cartridges. He checked for grit or lint on the ramp or feed lips and laid the magazines on the clean canvas of his folding cot. A tiny wrench removed the set screw from the suppressor, allowing the oval cylinder to unscrew from the threaded barrel. He put the suppressor in one of the empty coffee containers, filled the container with solvent and left the suppressor to soak.
He depressed the disassembly latch that replaced the Colt’s slide stop. The pistol’s slide and barrel assembly slipped forward and apart like a Beretta. The short high-tension recoil spring shot into his palm.
Lyons noted that Gadgets was watching. “Seen my new Colt?”
“Konzaki made that? How can you put a silencer on the barrel of a 1911? The barrel flops up and down during the cycle…”
“Look.” Lyons held up the slide assembly. He moved the barrel. “See? It’s different. And the ejector. And the interlink between the barrel and the slide. Andrzej says the barrel doesn’t unlock as Browning designed it. It’s like a Beretta now. When you fire, the barrel and slide travel back, the barrel unlocks for an instant but stays straight, the slide continues back and the brass ejects. That’s why the ejection port is cut all the way across. The brass flies straight up. The barrel stays straight on line the whole cycle. And there are big changes in the sear mechanism.”
Studying the modified components, the internal parts still bearing machining marks, here and there the heat marks of micro-welds, Gadgets joked, “Colt Frankenstein!”
“Decent accuracy, fires silent bursts of full-velocity hollowpoints. You saw what I did with it. I got no complaints about how it looks.”
Gadgets squatted down, balanced on the balls of his feet. He glanced to their taxi drivers, spoke too quietly for the others to hear. “Yeah, I saw what you did tonight. I got to talk to you…”
“This a criticism session?”
“Nan, man. You were beautiful tonight. For a guy who ain’t even a vet, you do real well. Wish you’d been with me in Nam.”
“When we got the surprise on that roof, you yelled for us to get out of there. You wanted to retreat.”
“Well… yeah. That would’ve been the intelligent thing to do.” Gadgets called out, “Politician! Over here. Help me with some wording… Dig it, Carl. Don’t get defensive. I’m trying to talk philosophy with you.”
“I wanted those rockets. I didn’t know they weren’t the right kind of rockets. That old man steered us wrong.”
“No problem with that. It’s cool. They could’ve had a million SAM-7s. Like you said, we could have gone home tonight. Rosario, our pal thinks I’m criticizing him when I say it would have been intelligent to have retreated tonight…”
Blancanales nodded. He pulled up another cot, sat down. “Could have gone wrong.”
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“It did go wrong,” Lyons told them. He dipped a bore brush in the coffee container of solvent and began to swab out the Colt’s short barrel. “We didn’t get the missiles.”
“See? He thinks I’m criticizing him,” said Gadgets. “Hey, I want to introduce the concept of an ‘Honorable Withdrawal.’ To retreat from an unfavorable turn of circumstances is not a crime. Dig who’s telling you this. Old Gadgets Schwarz, Special Forces, retired. Now active in Very Special Forces.”
“That’s why I’m glad I’m with you,” Blancanales said. “I figure I learn something once in a while.”
“I think you’re trying to prove something, you know that?” smiled Gadgets.
“I amtrying to prove something,” Lyons insisted. His voice had risen. He caught himself, lowered his tone to an urgent whisper. “I’m trying to prove I can make a difference. And for the last year or so, I have. I’ve helped my country, I’ve helped my people. I’ve helped people I didn’t know existed…”
“Okay, okay,” Gadgets grinned. “But just understand — next time we’re outnumbered, outgunned, ambushed and naked in the kill zone, retreat isan option.”
The buzz of Gadgets’s relay radio unit sounded.
Blancanales went to the hood of a taxi, brought the radio to where Gadgets knelt with Lyons.
Gadgets put the handset to his ear and listened. He looked to Lyons and Blancanales.
“The rockets…”
As his taxi cruised through streets lurid with neon Arabic signs, Gadgets received a call from Katz via scrambler-encoded radio. “I separated from the embassy group. This will be my only opportunity to brief you. Please take notes so that you may brief your compatriots.”
“How about a four-way?” Gadgets suggested. “A conference call. If you don’t mind the drivers hearing…”
“Where are the others?”
“In the cabs.”
“Very well.”
Keying his hand radio, Gadgets buzzed the others. “Politician. Ironman. Conference with the diplomat.”
“Waiting,” Blancanales answered.
“So what’s going on?” Lyons asked.
“Gentlemen. I do not have much time to speak. Soon I must rejoin our Agency associates. First, I inspected the site of your action. That group is now inoperative. Second, I received a report from friends who questioned your prisoners. You neutralized a group of Muslim Brotherhood and PLO assassins. That group planned a series of strikes against American and Western European diplomats. The attack on the limousines leaving the embassy was the first of the series. Our friends determined that the group did not participate in the attack on the jet.”
“Yeah,” Lyons interrupted. “We found out. They had rockets but not SAMs. All that for nothing.”
“Your time was not wasted,” Katz told him. “And simultaneous with your action, the Agency scored something of a success of its own. An hour ago, another secret flight left the airport.”
“Was it hit?” Blancanales asked.
“No. This time, it was an F-16 with electronic counter-measures and the speed to escape the missiles…”
“They get a fix on the ragheads?” Lyons broke in again.
“That was the purpose of the flight. I assure you, the Air Force is not risking the lives of pilots for nothing, not at a time when your American flyers in Egypt are calling all of their planes lead-lined coffins. The Agency had several teams of technicians in place and waiting. The technicians monitored a signal from the airport alerting the main terrorist group in the city. Then another team in the city monitored communications between the group’s command center and several units dispersed throughout the greater Cairo area.”
“These crazies sound organized,” Gadgets said. “They got good equipment?”
“They don’t have encoding. But the technicians say the radios are first-quality commercial equipment. Although the technicians could not pinpoint the headquarters, they did get to the approximate area of a unit as they launched a missile.
“The terrorists launched the missile from a truck.
The technicians followed the truck to a warehouse. Agency teams now have it under surveillance.
“It is possible that warehouse is the headquarters of the terrorist commander.
“However, our esteemed associates in the Agency may have compromised the operation. While we examined the site of your action against the Muslim and PLO terrorists, the driver of our limousine relayed the news of the warehouse to the walkie-talkie of Parks. I examined the radio. It is not equipped with encoding. It is possible the opposition also received the information.”
“Those short hairs are going to walk into another ambush for sure,” said Gadgets.
“Gentlemen,” intoned the voice of Katz, “it will be another hour before Parks and his men move on the warehouse. Is it possible for you to resolve the problem before that time?”
“You want us to volunteer to check out the kill zone?” Lyons demanded. “Is that what you’re asking?”
“Exactly.”
12
“Commander Omar!” a warrior called out. “Americans!”
The elegant leader of the National Front’s group in Cairo descended the wooden steps from the offices. He saw his Islamic soldiers clutching their Soviet autorifles and rocket launchers. They lusted for battle.
Only thirty minutes before, Omar had danced with a beautiful French girl at a reception for the PLO. But a signal from his beeper had taken him away from the champagne and Brazilian jazz rhythms. Rushing to this warehouse-fortress within the city, he learned of the escape of the American spy plane. Then his Libyan electronics technician told him of the snatches of radio messages between the CIA officers.
Thank Allah, thought the commander, that the United States had such greed it would sell the marvels of modern electronics to its enemies! Though his technician had learned his skills in the Soviet schools of South Yemen, he had worked with American components to monitor and record the communications of the Americans. Now, armed with foreknowledge of the Central Intelligence Agency plot, Omar and his warriors could slash out and kill, then escape untouched. Omar smiled to his warriors.
“I know. I have known of their plot all this night. And I am ready. Tonight, we kill many Americans.”
*
Headlights swept the walls. As Abdul stopped the taxi, Lyons stepped into the garbage of the gutter. The air stank of rot and insecticide. During the day, farm trucks and vendors jammed the street, shoppers crowding around tailgates and merchants’ stalls to buy foods fresh from the farms of the Nile. Now, where thousands walked in the daylight, Lyons walked alone. The gray luminescence of the Cairo night left the street market in darkness. No lights showed in the windows and doorways of the warehouses opening to the market.
Lyons moved through shadows, found the steel ladder that the cab’s headlights had revealed. He flicked on his penlight to see steel sheet and padlock barring unauthorized entry.
“We need a tire iron,” he whispered into his hand radio.
“On our way,” Blancanales answered.
Far down the block, another set of headlights flashed in the darkness. Rolling to a stop behind Abdul, Blancanales and Zaki left their cab. Zaki opened the trunk, took out a tire iron and an airline flight bag. Lyons blinked his penlight to reveal where he waited.
By the glow of the penlight, Zaki shoved the point of the tire iron through the shackle. Snapping the padlock away, they swung the steel gate aside.
Wordlessly, Lyons went first, the rusted steel of the ladder creaking with his weight. His hands felt the grit of years of dust and soot. As he neared the roof, he slowed, listening for any sounds or voices above him. He heard nothing. Finally, he eased his head over the edge.
He saw only a black expanse of roof and shadows. An army could be hiding in the darkness. He had to chance it. Here, a block away from the warehouse of the Muslim terrorists, he did not expect sentries. Hoping he wouldn’t get a surprise, he slipped over the top of
the wall.
Crouching in the shadow, he waited, listening, modified Colt in his hand. Somewhere on the roof, a fan flailed steel against steel. He heard the popping of a motorcycle.
He watched for shifts in the rooftop silhouettes of pipes and wires and fan housings. In the distance, a gentle wind carried dust from the desert, blurring the lights of modern Cairo’s high-rise towers. After minutes without moving, Lyons keyed his hand radio’s transmit button twice, then twice again.
The ladder creaked with steps. Lyons dashed across the roof, flattened himself against a fan housing. He listened for movement or the mechanical click of a released safety. He heard only the sound of a shoe scraping the wall behind him. Lyons snapped his fingers twice to give Blancanales his position.
A crouching Zaki followed seconds later. He unzipped his flight bag and pulled out his Uzi. He shoved extra magazines into the pockets of his jeans, then joined Lyons and Blancanales.
“Wizard,” Lyons whispered into his hand radio, “we’re on the roof.”
“See anyone?”
“No. Stand by, we’re moving.”
Loud in the early-morning quiet, tarred sheet metal flexed under their shoes as they hurried across the roof. The huge warehouse spanned the block. As they approached the other side, they moved slower, pausing behind ventilator pipes. Then they dashed forward, one man at a time.
Lyons crouched at the low wall and peered down at the street. Directly beneath them, a CIA surveillance van parked with several other trucks. Diagonally across the intersection of two streets, the warehouse of the Muslim terrorist group showed no lights. From their position, Lyons and Blancanales scanned the roof for sentries.
“There,” Blancanales pointed.
“Where?”
“The outline of that water tower. There’s the silhouette of an arm. A shoulder. See the rifle stock?”
“Yeah. But I don’t see any way to get there.”
“The Wizard will have to go up on that other block.” Lyons pointed to a line of buildings beyond the terrorist warehouse.
“Hey, Americans!” Zaki hissed. “Down there, the sidewalk!”
