by Chuck Holton
But there was to be no rest for the weary.
“Company behind,” hissed Hogan.
Liz spun. In the distance was another line of approaching vehicles.
Rip, still on point, had rounded a bend in the road with his gun at the ready. He came hurrying back. “Cars. Several. Almost here.”
They were going to be caught in a pincer movement.
The men melted into the shadows between the dwellings. John grabbed Liz’s hand and pulled her after him to a large olive tree, its silver leaves black in the night.
“Up.” He grabbed her around the waist and boosted.
With a surprised gulp, Liz grabbed the first fat branch she saw and pulled herself into a sitting position.
“Climb. Do not come down, no matter what happens.” Then John disappeared into the shadows.
Liz stared after him in disbelief. He’d left her! All night he’d been watching out for her, and now that real danger was here, he was gone.
A column of six cars rounded the curve at the end of the village. The other column, five in all, pulled in from the opposite end of town. Every vehicle bristled with men and arms.
Liz began climbing. After stepping on her skirt twice and nearly catapulting herself to the ground, she paused. She reached down between her legs, grabbed the back hem, and pulled it through and up. She tucked it into her waistband, trapping the front of the skirt in the pouch the move created. Her car keys clunked against her thigh, but she didn’t think they’d fall out of the pocket.
She nodded, satisfied. Not as tidy as slacks, but much safer than the fluttering gauzy material had been. She climbed as high as she safely could, then sat, clutching the trunk for security. She watched through the leaves as men jumped from the cars. All were shouting, and Liz listened carefully so she could tell John what they said.
There was no doubt about one thing: These men were searching for Valor and for her.
A couple of shots cracked the air. She jumped and grabbed at the tree’s trunk more tightly.
Who had shot? Had they spotted one of the team?
An Arabic voice roared in the street below. “Hold your fire! Hold your fire! Save every bullet for the infidels!”
Thankful for the leaves that hid her, Liz noticed that not one house in the village had turned on a light. Surely the shots had wakened the people even if the noise of the cars and men hadn’t. But no one acknowledged that their little town had become, at least for a few minutes, a terrorist stronghold.
Flashlight beams pierced the darkness. As Liz shifted a little, she caught sight through the leaves of a sign on one of the buildings. A beam played across the front window. A pharmacy. An idea took hold.
A man broke loose from the scrum in the road and headed straight for her tree. Liz thought she might throw up. She tried to hide her white face.
“Look!” the man called in Arabic. “See what I’ve found!”
H-5 Airfield, Jordan
MARY WALKER BURST through the door of the command center. She found Lou Williams hunched over a 1:200,000 scale topographical map of southern Lebanon, chewing on the plastic stick from a long-finished Tootsie Pop.
“Major Williams, I believe we have some good news.”
The commander looked up and muttered, “I could use some good news.”
“Come with me, then.” She waved her arm in a this-way gesture.
They went outside, and Mary shoved her hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt to ward off the chill desert air. She led him across the blacked-out tarmac toward a cluster of vehicles, some military and some civilian.
“Is that what I think it is?” Williams quickened his pace to the point where Mary had to jog to keep up.
Two hundred yards later as they neared the vehicles, Mary felt more awake than she had. “You wouldn’t believe what I had to go through to get it modified like you requested. They’re just finishing up now.”
The burly major maneuvered around a parked white box van and stopped. Mary almost bumped into him.
“Hot dog,” he said. “Just look at that.”
A red airplane sat in the center of the assorted vehicles, larger than a child’s toy model but quite a bit smaller than a real plane, even a little Cessna. Men in desert tan flight suits hovered over it, working with screwdrivers and socket wrenches by the light of a van’s headlamps.
“We had to bring it over from H-3 airbase in Iraq.”
“Amazing. It looks like a sewing machine with wings.”
“It’s called an Arcturus T-15. The military doesn’t have them yet, but we’ve got a few hanging around. Most of our Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are designed to operate at very high altitudes, but that wouldn’t help us in this case, since your team’s FM radios won’t carry much more than a few miles. This one goes low and slow. It should be able to pick up their signal, and then bounce it via UHF to the command module that flies with it, then to us at base.”
“What’re they doing to it, rewinding the rubber band?”
She smiled. “They’re finishing up the install of an FM module that will be able to link to your team’s IC radios.”
It had taken a call to the CIA division chief to get the thing here. She didn’t bother saying that she hadn’t actually gotten clearance to modify the avionics on the craft. Sometimes it was better to ask forgiveness than permission.
The major looked as happy as she had ever seen him. “Great. Absolutely great. Now let’s get this thing in the air!”
Mary wished she shared his enthusiasm, but the chances of actually finding the lost team were lower than the odds on nickel slots in Atlantic City. For all they knew, Task Force Valor was already captured or worse. She hoped for the major’s sake that her skepticism didn’t show.
He crouched, inspecting the little plane. “Where does the…er, pilot go?”
“Pilots.” She looked beyond him toward the other end of the runway. “Here they come now.” She pointed toward the large gray cargo plane lumbering down the airstrip toward them.
“They control this unmanned thing from inside the C-130?”
Mary nodded, raising her voice to be heard over the sound of the approaching aircraft. “That’s a DC-130 Echo, configured to launch and control drones and UAVs. I’ll climb aboard and oversee the use of the T-15, then relay our findings back to you. The range on it is only 150 kilometers, which is just short of the distance between us and the coast, so it will cover most of Lebanon. If we fly up toward Jordan’s northern border, toward Syria and launch it just this side of the Gaza Strip, we should have about ten hours of time on station. As soon as the T-15 makes Lebanese airspace, we’ll begin broadcasting. Then we’ll point the UAV toward the beach where the team should be and hope we can make contact.”
She put up a hand to keep her red hair out of her eyes as the approaching craft turned and bathed them with its prop wash before the pilot shut down its engines. Sometimes, like now, she thought about how convenient the short military buzz cut was, but the thought was only momentary. In truth, she knew her hair, wild and unruly as it often was, was her glory. Good thing, too. Something had to make up for the millions of freckles that came with it.
Shouts went up from the men working on the UAV as they frantically tried to keep it from blowing away from the plane’s inadvertent assault. She watched as they hustled the T-15 to one side of the DC-130 and began securing the small plane to hard points on the wing.
The major shook his head and turned to Mary. “Look, I know this is a long shot, Agent Walker. I appreciate your setting this up.”
She nodded, afraid to look at him for fear he’d see the hopelessness she felt. For some reason the “German bikers” felt special to her.
“You know, Major, we risk getting ourselves in hot water with the Israelis over this whole thing. My boss has been on the phone with their intel folks and is trying to placate them while we get this done. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the UAV never makes it out of the occupied territories.”
“Pl
ease,” Williams said. “No more happy thoughts.”
The crew chief from the C-130 beckoned to her. She acknowledged him with a wave of her hand. Williams waved, too. Then he got that determined yet placid look she’d seen before, and she bet he was praying again, only this time to himself.
Once again she found that idea strangely comforting. “Time for you to go.” With his jaw set purposefully, he added, “Godspeed, Agent Walker. I’ll be here praying.”
She grinned. She’d been right; he had been talking to God, and he planned to some more, this time on her behalf. How cool was that? She watched his oversized frame march back toward the clamshell and wondered what Godspeed really meant.
Zebdine
The terrorists finally drove off, half in each direction, and Liz climbed down the tree with her skirt tucked out of her way. John wanted to grab her and hold her. Of course, he didn’t.
And now she wanted him to let her traipse across the street and knock on the door of the town pharmacy, alone and unprotected.
“Are you nuts?” John stared down into her beautiful brown eyes. Every time he looked at her, she was prettier, even with her black eye, dirty face, and messed-up hair. And she was gutsy, too, a quality he much admired.
So how could he let her do something that was, as far as he could see, almost suicidal? His heart had nearly stopped when the terrorist shouted and raced straight toward the tree in which she hid. When the man picked up a small kitten cowering at the base of the trunk and walked back to his car with it, John had had to lean against the wall of the house beside him to hold himself up.
“You have to trust me, John. I’m 90 percent sure the owner will help us.”
“And what about the other ten?”
She shrugged.
They stood with the rest of the team in the shadows of a vacant lot between two old cement buildings, scrutinizing a short line of dark storefronts across the one paved street that bisected the little village. As they watched, the second floor lights at the pharmacy came on.
John sighed. Granted, they’d escaped detection for the moment, but they were a long way from safe. He had to find some way to make contact with the major at H-5. A phone sounded like their best bet. They’d call the States and get the staff duty officer at their unit to radio H-5 and give Major Williams their coordinates. Then hopefully thirty minutes later he’d receive a message from the major via the States with his instructions.
The hope was that their commander had a better plan for getting them out of the country than the one they were currently looking at, which was to make their way on foot through hostile territory with one wounded man, one civilian, and very little food.
This was even assuming that once they made it to the beach, they’d be able to signal the offshore fleet. John still wasn’t sure how they would do that with their only functional radios being their low-wattage FM units, carried only for communication within the team.
As soon as the terrorists drove away, Sweeney had located a public pay phone, only to find upon closer inspection that it wasn’t connected to anything. Now Liz wanted to simply knock on the front door of an obviously closed pharmacy and ask the owner if they could use his phone. Yeah, right.
“I’m almost sure he’ll help us,” Liz repeated.
“What gives you that impression?” John was aware of the other men crouched around him in the shadows and thought he knew what they were thinking. This girl is going to get us killed yet! Or herself.
“Look, John. I’ve lived here. I know the culture. Most Lebanese are tired of the fighting and violence. They resent the terrorists for keeping things stirred up. We stand a good chance that this man will let us make our call for that reason alone.”
Sweeney made a disbelieving growl, but John ignored him.
“He’s an Arab,” John said. “He has to live in this country. Helping us is very dangerous for him. And even if he does hate the violence and the terrorists, that doesn’t guarantee he wouldn’t call the local Hezbollah chief thirty seconds after slamming the door in our faces.”
Maybe he was being overly cautious, but skepticism was part of what had kept him alive this long. He stared at the Hezbollah political party sign that hung across a shop front fifty yards to his left. A fist holding aloft an AK-47. Now that was a political statement.
“Ah, but I’ve got another reason why I think he’ll help.” Liz grinned like a kid who knows the right answer when no one else in the class does.
John raised an eyebrow.
“Shine your light on his window,” she instructed.
He hesitated.
“Go ahead. If no one in the village responded to all those men and the gun shots, they aren’t going to be upset by a lone beam.”
John turned and shot a beam at the pharmacy window.
“See that decal?” Liz asked. “That’s the seal of the American University of Beirut. The pharmacist went to AUB. I’ll just mention my father’s name, and he’ll let me in, at least to use his phone.”
“Your father teaches pharmacology?”
“Well, no. He teaches sociology, but the pharmacist will undoubtedly recognize his name.”
Again Sweeney made a small verbal sneer. Again John ignored him. For some reason, though, the other man’s attitude annoyed him.
“I know it sounds crazy, John, but just trust me on this, please? I’ve been praying for God’s leading the whole time we’ve been walking, and I really feel like this is what we should do.”
“I thought you were having trouble with God.”
“Well, yeah, but I haven’t abandoned Him.”
Oh, right. That was me.
“Okay, Liz, I tell you what. I’ll write down a phone number to the shop at Bragg and a set of coordinates indicating our location.”
She looked at him and nodded, eyes alert.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out some Lebanese livre notes. “You take this money over there and knock on the guy’s door. Tell him your car broke down and offer him the money to let you use his phone. If he agrees, you call the number and tell the person who answers that you are with Task Force Valor at these coordinates and need to get that message to our commander at H-5. Then thank the pharmacist and come back here. We’ll find somewhere to hole up and get some rest while we figure out what to do next.”
“But John—” Liz started to argue, then stopped herself. Something about her face changed. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought she was almost smiling. “Okay, give me the number.”
John hastily produced a pad from a vest pocket and scribbled down the number. “You’ll have to dial 011 from here, I think.”
Rip leaned over to him. “Dude, better yet, give her this calling card I picked up at the Moevenpick. It has the directions for calling the States right on the back.”
John took the card. “You must have been a great Boy Scout, Rubio.”
“No, but I think I beat up a Boy Scout once. Does that count?” The lanky sergeant’s grin cut through the darkness.
“Don’t worry, guys. I’ve called the States many times. I know what I’m doing.” Liz took the calling card and piece of paper from John, then covered her head with her scarf. “I won’t be long.” She turned to go.
“Wait,” Rubio hissed as he took a couple of steps after her. “Take my radio.” He pulled the small unit from his vest and handed it to her. “If you get in trouble, just press this button twice and we’ll be right there.”
“Thanks, Rip.” She slid the radio into one of the deep pockets in her skirt.
“Great idea, Rip.” John felt much relieved. He wasn’t sending her off completely helpless.
Liz threaded her way between two parked cars and onto the road. She looked both ways and quickly walked across. She rang the bell on the door of the pharmacy, then waited.
Nothing happened.
“This is a bad idea,” Sweeney growled.
“This whole mission was a bad idea.” John didn’t take his eyes off of Liz. She stood
hugging herself against the cool air, looking up and down the empty street. She rang again. The lights above the shop went out. Bad sign.
John stood. “I’m going to get her. Cover me.”
“Hold up,” Hogan hissed. “Car coming down the road!”
Sweeney swore under his breath. “That girl is bad luck!”
John craned his neck and saw a dark car rolling slowly toward them. It looked like whoever was in the vehicle was searching for something.
Or someone! John whistled softly, trying to get Liz’s attention. He was about to throw caution away and charge across the street to her when the door to the shop opened. Liz talked to the paunchy, mustachioed man in rumpled khakis and a T-shirt. The man listened intently and then beckoned Liz inside.
John’s heart almost stopped when she turned back toward where the team was hiding, smiled, and motioned for them to join her. Apparently she hadn’t yet noticed the dark car, which was still about a hundred yards away. She beckoned again, waving happily toward the team’s position.
Oh, God, please. Let her see the car! He forgot for the moment that he wasn’t speaking to God anymore.
She didn’t, but the pharmacist did. He drew her into the shop and closed the door.
Okay, God. You get a point for that one.
The men flattened themselves on the ground as the car came nearer. When it was close enough for John to smell the diesel exhaust fumes, he identified the vehicle as an old Mercedes. The driver sent flashlight beams probing the shadows on both sides of the street. John did his best to become one with the earth, hoping that the car hadn’t been close enough for the occupants to see Liz waving.
Fortunately, a beat-up van parked between the team and the road shielded them from view as the car passed. When it had gone through town and sped off, the team got to their feet. John heard the soft clicks as his men returned their weapons to safe mode.
The pharmacy door opened. Liz’s head poked out, and she beckoned to them once again.
“You gotta hand it to her,” Doc said, chuckling. “The girl’s got spunk.”
