Running the Maze (27 page)

*   *   *

B
ETH
L
EDFORD AND
M
OHAMMAD
al-Attas were thrown off their feet when the explosion shook the mountain. They were halfway through the big tunnel beneath the river, and she momentarily wondered if the blast might crack a seam that would drown them beneath tons of churning water.

“Get up! Get up!” she screamed at the engineer, who was still on his knees, dazed and shaking his head. A small cut had been torn in his scalp, and blood flowed on his cheek. Beth grabbed his sleeve and hauled him up from the floor.

There wasn’t much to this guy, she thought. No muscle tone, uncoordinated, and weird eyes that spelled geek. She yelled, “Now run. Run like your life depends on it.”

Al-Attas shambled forward, smelling the dank surroundings as his mind processed some formulas about pressure limits. He was pleased that the structure had held so well against the force of the unexpected explosion, just as he designed it to do. There had been no serious damage. The chief engineer smiled at the woman. He got another hard push and moved a bit faster.

“I didn’t say jog. I said
run.
” This dude was slowing things down. “We’ve got to reach the other end of the tunnel and then get topside. If we miss the extraction bird, we’re dead, because it won’t wait. Come on. Just follow me. You can do it.” Her boots beat a steady tempo on the cold stone floor.

The engineer was breathing harder, panting. Running felt good. It made him remember being outside and free, trotting lazily around in the darkness, and feeling cool wind on his body. The tunnel took on the appearance of a big hole to him, which it was, and he imagined a wolf chasing a rabbit, closing steadily.

Beth slowed at the end of the tunnel and stopped at the bottom of the metal staircase. When she turned to check on the engineer, his fist came flying at her face, so unexpected and fast that she did not have time to block it. The impact was followed by a terrible yowl, and then the engineer leaped and knocked her flat. She rolled her head away from the blow, moving with the punch to dissipate its force, although the knuckles smashed her left cheek hard enough to make her see stars. While she spun downward, a second blow smacked the top of her head; then the tackle put her down totally. Her rifle was still firmly attached to her harness, but she felt the attacker’s hands grasping for the knife on her belt, and the man’s hot breath on her face.

“What the hell are you doing?” she shouted. With his hands going for the knife, he had no way to block her palm strike at his nose, and she punched in hard. The nose broke, and al-Attas’s head flew back, leaving the neck unprotected for her to drive three stiff fingers into the trachea.

The wild-eyed man deflated like a balloon. He grabbed his throat with both hands, gagging to try to get air, and rolled away. Beth turned around on the floor, kneed him in the groin, then clocked him on the temple with the butt of her rifle. Mohammad Al-Attas was down and out, blood pouring from his nose.

Ledford got to her feet and lifted her fingers to check her face. She tasted blood and felt the pulsing ache by her eye. Nothing serious. She kicked him in the ribs, and he emitted a long groan that indicated he wasn’t totally unconscious. “I really want to shoot your sorry ass, but you apparently are a valuable target,” she said and secured his wrists with plastic flex-cuffs. Unbuckling his belt, she tightened it into a noose around his neck so she could pull him along on a leash, then cut away the top button on his jeans and slit the waistband. “You can use your hands to hold up your pants. Come on.” She yanked the leash and hauled him upstairs.

*   *   *

T
HE EXPLOSION FAR BELOWGROUND
had spent its force by the time the concussion wave reached the main roadway topside, where it had hardly made the rocks grumble. Ayman al-Masri figured it was just the opening of the battle against the Zionist raiders and continued to study the maps of the complex that he had spread on a table. A tinny voice on his radio broke into his thoughts, and one of his bodyguards who had broken into the infirmary stronghold reported, “Gunshots on the third level, directly above us.” Gunfire was different than the explosion; someone had to be present to pull a trigger. He decided to tighten the hunt by surging everyone into the one area where he knew the enemy was located.

“What is your status?” he asked.

“We are inside the infirmary,” said the bodyguard. “No one is here, but we found a hatch that leads to the floor above, where the shooting is.”

“Pursue them. I am sending help immediately.”

“Yes, sir. We’re going up.”

Al-Masri’s palms felt wet with perspiration, and he wiped them on his robe. This might be over quickly if they could lock the commando team into that one space. Al-Masri could make up for their lack of training by using the advantage of sheer numbers. He gave a quick order to everyone. “All teams converge to the third level of the east tower. There are probably not more than three or four Zionists to fight. We will have them trapped there. Use your combined firepower to keep their heads down, then wipe them out.”

Men who had just entered the west tower responded and came back out in a rush to cross the broad bridge and descend into the east-side tunnel. More would advance through the access corridors just below the roadway.

The bodyguard who lifted the hatch cover above the infirmary had to push hard against the unexpected weight, and the grenade booby trap detonated in the gun room bunker with a harsh
craaack
that covered his agonizing scream as he caught the full force of the explosion in his head and chest. A coil of thick smoke oozed through the open door into the third-level hallway, and single rounds of machine-gun ammunition ignited with a clatter in the intense heat.

Swanson heard men running down the main stairwell and entering the hall, and he shoved himself back deeper into his door frame. Four went past his corridor without glancing at it, firing blindly into the smoke ahead. When they were beyond his position, he came out and lit them up from behind with short bursts, using more bullets than actually needed for the job, but wanting to use the surprise effect of a noisy firefight on the oncoming force.

The next batch paused and slowed their advance; then Kyle triggered a burst that chipped the lower steps, and drew a barrage of automatic fire in return. He bellowed as if he had been hit and ran back into the churning smoke, dropping flat at the corner of two corridors to watch them come down. They shot wildly around the first intersection until they discovered no one was there, and the easy capture of that little bit of territory gave them a false feeling of victory, emboldening them while at the same time making them more careless.

Kyle held his fire, using the time to rig another grenade booby trap and string a tripwire low across the hallway. The group moved closer down the main hallway, laying waste to the next intersection of corridors, gaining even more confidence when no fire was returned. They had captured two intersections without incident and stepped up the advance, talking loudly and with confidence. He leaned out and buzzed them, then ducked back after the single long burst and took off for the nearest spiral stairwell.

He paused halfway up to fire again as the more aggressive pursuers came charging around the corner. He wanted them to have their eyes locked on him, rather than where they were going. The lead man cleared the tripline without even seeing it, but the toe of the fighter behind him hit the taut wire, which yanked out the pin, and the grenade exploded, filling the hallway with flying shrapnel, confusion, blood, and terror. Swanson dashed the rest of the way up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

25

T
HE OPENING STEPS OF
his violent choreography to reach the top of the bridge had gone as smoothly as a waltz on
Dancing with the Stars
, a series of well-drilled maneuvers so common and practiced that they even had names. He had opened with Excessive Force, to lure the curious enemy into a kill zone, and followed that with a Flash Attack to stun them. Now he was falling back in a controlled Australian Peel.

The Peel was a sniper’s protective game of leapfrog on defense. After an attack against a larger force, the sniper would stay put and lay down suppressive fire while his spotter fell back twenty meters, hit the ground, and took up the firing to allow the sniper to bound back another twenty meters, then repeat the process. The difference today at the bridge was that Swanson had to perform both roles: fire, then give up some ground to his pursuers to make them think they were making progress, with no idea that it was being given to them. Kyle did not want to break contact, and so far, it had worked. He was picking apart the opposing force.

He found no one waiting when he emerged up on the second level, so he ran to another doorway and squeezed in tight again, thinking of what to do next. He was uninjured and still had plenty of ammo if he was careful, some C-4, several hand grenades, and a bandolier of five grenades for the launcher that hung beneath the barrel of his CAR-15. There were plenty of moves left, although he was feeling the press of time. Eleven minutes.

He could hear the pursuers milling around below, an indication of a lack of discipline, training, experience, and leadership. He fired a single shot back down the stairs to focus their attention again, and the bullet struck metal stairs and zinged away like the clanging of a bell. The enemy fighters realized their quarry was waiting for them up on the next level, still ready to fight.

Kyle intended to make the most of his clear advantage in this small underground city of channels and burrows. Rooting out a skilled defender required patience, determination, luck, and skill, and the butcher’s bill was usually high. An untrained force such as he was facing today had little choice other than to pour in a lot of bodies.

*   *   *

“A
HLO
?”
A
STRANGE VOICE
from the radio was tinged with despair, even as the caller said a universal form of “Hello.”

Ayman al-Masri of the New Muslim Order responded without introduction. “Who is this? Where are you?”

“We are on the third level, mister,” said the nervous voice. “There has been a horrible battle down here. The casualties have been heavy.”

“How many of the Zionist raiders have been killed?”

“None that I have seen, sir.”

“Well, how many are there?”

A pause. “About six?”

“Can you actually see the enemy from your position?”

A long pause. “No, mister.”

“Then how do you know there are six?”

“Ummh. That is just my estimate, mister. So much damage. So many men are down and badly hurt. Please send medical help.”

Al-Masri knew the pleading coward on the radio was hiding, not advancing.

“What is your name?” The demand was almost a snarl.

The radio went silent. Bonte Ibara had no intention of giving his name to the terrorist leader and possibly being singled out later for blame, or worse, to be appointed leader of the other men down in this hellish battle. The fifty-one-year-old Congolese man, with weathered dark skin and sprinkles of white in his black hair. was a month from the end of a one-year contract as an electrician subcontractor with a Saudi construction firm. Bonte looked over at his friend Guychel Mouko, a heavy equipment operator who had come north with Ibara as a contract worker. They had lived for months on meager rations, sending almost everything they earned back to their families. Both had come to work on a bridge, not to fight soldiers. They were not even Muslim.

Having survived civil wars in Africa, both had seen many times what bullets and explosions could do to the human body. Let the young hotheads who had never tasted a real fight do whatever they wanted, like that boy who had run forward without looking and stepped on the booby trap. The blast had torn the torso in half, painted the walls with blood and purple intestines, and clouded the corridor with smoke. Only a fool would want to be the first to go into that kind of death trap against an Israeli raiding party. Bonte and Guychel had lagged far behind coming down the stairs and were the only members of their small group still standing.

“Can you hear me?” The radio squawked, the New Muslim Order man obviously angry. “Give me your name!”

Guychel shook his head. “No.” He gently removed the radio from the hand of his friend and hurled it far down the corridor, where it smashed into pieces as it bounced and slid along the rock floor.

Bonte pushed open a door and went inside, and Guychel followed, closing it behind him, then turning the lock on the supply room. They put their AK-47s aside, sat on the boxes, and lit cigarettes. “It will be over soon. Fights this intense never last too long,” Bonte said. “What do you hear from home?”

Elsewhere in the complex, other workers were making similar decisions to let sudden, deadly violence pass them by.

*   *   *

T
EN MINUTES REMAINED BEFORE
the inbound extraction birds were due topside. Kyle Swanson could not waste time hanging around in the second level of this subterranean maze. Nothing of value would be gained by forcing another firefight, but he had to do some damage before leaving.

The pursuing force was already in disarray, and their firing had momentarily ceased, so Swanson intended to make his next move as horrific as possible before they could shake off the feeling that certain death lurked around every corner. Mobility and his pitiless attacks had tilted things in his favor, and he needed to capitalize on that. His brain told him to be patient, to work it through step by step.
Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.