Thunderstrike in Syria (11 page)

I scooped up the fallen machine gun just in time to see the man with the UZI and the two thugs from the guardroom getting to their feet. The three terrorists didn't know it, but they were as close to eternity as they would ever get without being dead. The man with the UZI was jerking up the barrel as I pulled the trigger of the Russian chopper, the series of staccato explosions deafening. At this close range, I could see the hot projectiles ripping off tiny pieces of cloth and particles of burned flesh as the Spitzer-shaped bullets bored all the way through their bodies, making them jerk like monstrous marionettes before finally flopping to the floor.

Sahl, cursing the Syrians in Hebrew, rushed to the aid of Risenberg who was engaged in a tug of war over possession of a machine gun.

Risenberg was much faster than Sahl. He jumped up, jammed his feet into the Syrian's midsection and fell backward, pushing out with his legs as his body landed on its back. The Syrian went flying over Risenberg's head, but it was Risenberg who retained the machine gun. The other Israelis, grabbing the weapons of the defeated terrorists, dodged and the Syrian hit the floor with a thud.

"Snap it up," I said. "That blast I let off has to have warned the whole damn camp! Two of you watch the south side door while Risenberg and I secure the guardroom." My eyes shot to Risenberg, who had gotten to his feet and was ready with the PPsH in his hands, and he nodded.

We rushed through the prison room door, our foot sliding for a moment on the widening pools of blood spreading from underneath the three corpses. Already hundreds of flies were buzzing over the dead men, and only then did I notice that the Israelis being tortured under the arbor had stopped screaming. Either the Syrians had killed them or had taken them down.

Risenberg and I darted across the south side doorway and I motioned to him to take a position to the left of the guardroom entrance. I'd been in scores of firefights and experience had taught me that wise gun fighters stay calm, lay low and wait for the enemy to come to them.

I took one last look behind me and saw Cham Elovitz picking up the UZI and John Ivinmetz and Martin Lomsky grabbing the PPsH chatter boxes from the two other corpses. Lev Wymann and Hymie DuSold, each armed with an AK-47, were on either side of the southside door.

Grateful that Risenberg was a trained fighter, I looked over at him as he crouched by the doorway. I saw only determination in his eyes. "Shove your barrel around the edge and trigger off a five round burst, then I'll go in. Count five and follow."

A moment before Risenberg dropped to one knee, thrust the machine gun around the edge of the doorway and fired, I heard the two AK-47s roar. The SLA was attacking, and we hadn't even gotten off to a good start.

Hunched low, I streaked into the guardroom and darted to the left. Within that fraction of a second, I caught a very brief glimpse of crates, a wall-full of weapons, a table, chairs, and heads and torsos popping up — four, five or more terrorists! I wasn't sure; I didn't have time to count.

I fired on the move, from left to right, the PPsH roaring and shuddering in my hands. One man let out a short yell when several 7.65mm bullets punched him in the chest. I caught a flash of another man's face dissolving in a messy shower of flesh and blood as four or five high velocity slugs exploded his head.

Almost to the window of the south wall, I skidded to a stop and dropped in time to avoid a stream of bullets coming from behind crates on the northeast side of the room. A slug buzzed so close to the left side of my head I thought I could hear it whispering obscenely at me. Another bullet tore through my shirt and grazed my left shoulder, the pain making me angry.

To my right, while I swung my weapon toward the northeast side of the room, another machine gun began chattering — Risenberg's. A quick glance showed that the Israeli fighter had come in low and was raking the tops of the crates with a deadly fire, his bursts having already killed one man who lay face down across one of the large wooden boxes.

Toward my side of the room, three Syrians rose up as a unit to fire. The firefight had progressed with the speed of several bolts of lightning and I reasoned that the three had assumed I was either dead or too wounded to be of any danger to them. As a result, they had crawled behind the crates to the northwest side, no doubt thinking they could rear up and splatter Risenberg before he could swing his muzzle around to them.

For a moment, one of the men, seeing me, opened his mouth in surprise. That split second enabled me to bore a hole through his chest, the impact sending him sprawling all the way back to the north wall.

The last two terrorists hesitated, uncertain of whether to fire at me or Risenberg. The one with the mustache, so long it drooped past his chin, decided on me. The second man chose Risenberg.

I ducked to one side an instant before my attacker pulled the trigger, ignoring the chain of slugs that sliced the air a foot from me and opening up with my own PPsH. The terrorist's head wobbled like a top as my stream of 7.65s damn near decapitated him. Risenberg hadn't been much kinder to the man trying to neutralize him.

Feeling that I was definitely having a bad day, I saw that the rack on the east wall was filled with AK-47 assault rifles and PPsH machine guns, each weapon containing a forty-round «banana» shaped magazine.

Firing was still coming from the hallway, in reply to the SLA people from the outside.

"Tell them in the hall that it's all clear in here," I yelled at Risenberg, who already was snatching AK-47s from the rack.

"I doubt if any of us make it to the tanks," he said calmly, tossed me an AK, then turned and ran into the hallway. I pulled back the cocking knob of the Russian assault rifle, with the thought that it was one of the finest weapons in the world — far more accurate at a longer range than the Israeli UZI, the British Sten, or the U. S. M3-A1 grease gun. Even when rarely cleaned and firing corroded ammunition, it continues to be an effective weapon.

I hurried to the south side window, the only one in the room, and cautiously looked out. The Arabs were firing from the north side of the Tower of Lions, but why weren't slugs coming through this window? Looking around the room, I soon discovered the reason — grenades! Risenberg and I had been sitting on one big time bomb. We were lucky that in killing the terrorists we hadn't blown ourselves to smithereens. The SLA terrorists outside were not firing through the window because they obviously didn't want to destroy costly and valuable equipment.

Israelis poured into the room and began grabbing AK-47s from the rack. 'Take as many as you can carry," I said. "I'll explain later."

"We're as good as dead," muttered Karl Nierman. "It's over two hundred feet to the tanks."

Privately agreeing with him, I didn't comment as we left the room, our arms loaded with AKs and PPsH sub-guns, and rushed out into the hall where DuSold and Wymann were still firing two and three round bursts. Risenberg and Keifer gave them each an AK-47 and I said, "Listen, all of you. I'll tell you how we can do it, the only way that will give us half a chance."

"There's eleven of us and hundreds of them!" Cham Elovitz was skeptical.

"But only fifty or sixty of them are firing." I quickly pointed out. "Three of us can fire from each side of the doorway. We'll rake the tower and anything else where we see an enemy. The moment the six stop firing, five of us will make a dash for it and set up for the other six…"

"Let's get on with it," Ben Sahl said. He got down on one knee to the side of DuSold and John Ivinmetz took a position to the side of him. On the opposite side of the door, Jacob Keifer and Cham Elovitz took positions by Lev Wymann.

The rest of us cocked our weapons, listening to the clattering of empty shell casings falling to the floor. The cordite fumes were so thick they stung our eyes.

Then the six stopped firing and, taking a deep breath, I leaped through the door, expecting at any moment to feel the hammerlike blow of a bullet.

We didn't have time to aim, the four Israelis zigzagging with me across the open space. All we could do was snap off short bursts at the north side of the Tower of Lions and in the general direction of the southeast corner from which other SLA members were firing. The other six came behind us, racing in a crooked pattern similar to our own.

It was pure luck that we were still alive, although slugs were sizzling all around us. I felt a bullet tear through my pants at my left inner thigh; another tore through the rolled up sleeve of my right arm. Still a third barely nicked the rubber heel of my right boot.

But no man's luck lasts forever. We heard Jacob Keifer cry out when we were almost to the northeast corner of the Tower. We all knew that he was more than wounded; now that he was down the SLA would chop him to pieces. And we saw, too, why the men underneath the arbor had stopped screaming: all three had been hacked to pieces with knives, flies and insects by the millions now feeding on their corpses.

Now and then we leaped over the dead bodies of SLA terrorists that DuSold and Wymann had killed from the south doorway. The ten of us, panting, raced past the east wall of the Tower, triggering off short bursts at the few windows and at scattered groups of terrorists running ahead of us. Then we were nine as Hymie DuSold jerked from the impact of a slug and fell to the hot, hard ground… we continued past the southeast corner of the ruins, some of us raking the Syrians crouched there, the rest of us firing at the killers within the vicinity of the line of armor. The guerrillas reacted out of sheer panic, not expecting us to get as far as we had.

I bent low, exchanging my empty AK-47 for a machine gun lying beside a dead terrorist. The sub-gun was a 9-millimeter Swiss MP Neuhausen. When I was captured I noticed that the enemy carried a variety of weapons from different nations. To me this was evidence that the SLA had wide contacts with revolutionary groups all over the world.

Straight as an arrow, I headed for the end T-54 Russian tank, the Israelis and I firing in all directions, all of us taking the same zigzagging course. Gradually it dawned on the Syrians that the tanks were our goal and they did their best to stop us. One man tried to close the hatch over the end tank's driving compartment, but I blew him away before he could succeed. Then I almost cut in two a Syrian who, on top of the turret, tried to drop down into the fighting compartment through the hatch of the Commander's Cupola. The Israelis raked the rest of the vehicles, chopping down screaming guerrillas frantically trying to get inside the second tank and four of the six Gronshiv armored cars.

With ricochets whining all around me, I reached the front of the end T-54 tank and crouched down by the slanting glacis plate. Lev Wymann and Joe Risenberg skidding down beside me several moments later.

"I've always wanted to drive a baby like this," panted Risenberg, patting the hard, hot steel of the tank.

As Ben Solomon and Cham Elovitz jumped down beside us, I asked Risenberg, "Are you sure that you can?"

"Any of us could," Risenberg said, fixing red-rimmed eyes on me. "We were all members of the Israeli 3rd Armored Brigade.

"Here come the others," Solomon said.

The last four Israelis darted for the second T-54 whose hatches were also open to circulate air. Benjamin Sahl and John Ivinmetz carelessly exposed themselves by climbing up on the rear glacis plate deck. Sahl caught a blast of slugs in the back, the impact knocking him flat to the transmission louvres on the right side. He lay still, his right arm dangling over the exhaust silencer.

Ivinmetz's hands were on the top rod of the external storage rack fastened to the rear of the turret when he was riddled with projectiles. He didn't cry out. He only sagged on the engine louvres and lay still.

The other men and I stared, grim-faced and hurting inside. Martin Lomsky and Karl Nierman, realizing that the two of them could not operate the enormous T-54, rushed to the first armored car next to the tank and crawled into the six-wheeled vehicle through the side hatchway of the driver's compartment.

"Let's move," I said bitterly. "Risenberg, you drive."

"I'll be the co-driver," Cham Elovitz said. "That way I'll be able to work the front hull machine gun."

"The first thing we must do is destroy the other tank," I said grimly. "Then we're going to shell everything in sight."

We piled into the tank through the hatches over the driver's compartment, me. Wymann and Solomon going in first. In a very short while, Risenberg and Elovitz crawled in and secured the hatches while, in the fighting compartment of the turret, Wymann and I familiarized ourselves with the cannon and checked the shells in the ammunition storage bin. Ben Solomon first checked the loader's hatch, making sure it was locked, then climbed the ladder on the cupola's platform and locked the commander's hatch.

In spite of the heat and stink of unwashed bodies, I grinned, thinking of the superb fighting machine we had at our disposal. The T-54 was not the best the Russians had, but it was one of the best. For one thing, the tank had a 140mm gun whose shell left the barrel at a velocity of 5,107 feet per second, the cannon itself stabilized both in elevation and azimuth by means of delicate gyroscopic equipment. This meant that the gun maintained the angle and the bearing set by the gunner, regardless of how the tank might be maneuvering.

The gun itself was not only extremely accurate, but was equipped with a first-class muzzle brake and double fume extractor. I recalled, too, what I had read about the T-54's power system. The tank had a regenerative steering system that enabled the driver to vary his turning circle in relation to the gear engaged. This meant that the lower the gear, the tighter the turning radius until, when in neutral, the tank could be pivoted on its axis. Of course, the gunner rotated the turret and turret platform by means of pedals in front of his seat.