Thunderstrike in Syria (15 page)

The carrier was sixty feet from the closest side of the road when Risenberg applied the emergency brake and jammed down hard on the pedal of the regular brake. But the carrier continued to move ahead at a furious rate of speed. Risenberg turned the wheel to avoid hitting a boulder the size of a washtub, the slight turn causing the vehicle to rock violently from side to side. Brakes whining, rubber screaming, the carrier reached the end of the slope and started across what could be called a road. The instant the front tires touched the level section, Risenberg began to turn the steering wheel slowly to the right.

Realizing his strategy, I yelled through the hatchway, "Hang on back there and stay to the left."

Risenberg had a method in his madness: he was not only slowing the big vehicle, but also keeping the front end from hitting the granite face on the opposite side of the road. If he miscalculated the turn, however, the rear of the carrier would swing around too soon and we'd turn over. At the last moment, he gave the steering wheel half a turn. The cab moved to the right, away from the granite, while the left rear side swung around toward the rock. Risenberg turned the wheel again, and the left end corner of the carrier's boxlike rear slammed into the rock face. Risenberg and I braced ourselves. The personnel carrier came to a dead stop.

Risenberg and I exchanged glances. I yelled through the hatch, "Anyone hurt back there?"

"We're all right," came the reply from Solomon.

"Now we'll see what kind of shape we're in," Risenberg said and turned on the ignition. He shifted gears, let out the clutch and stepped on the gas. A few minutes later we were on the pebbly road and jerking back and forth from Risenberg's testing the brakes. They were sluggish but worked to our satisfaction.

"Now catch up with that psychopath who calls himself the Hawk," I said scornfully.

"Don't count your terrorists until they're caught." Risenberg laughed. "We'll catch him. His carrier is weighed down. Ours isn't. He must have twenty or more men with him. The odds sure as hell aren't on our side."

"They can hear our engine," I said. "You might as well turn on the lights. As for the odds, keep your fingers crossed and pray."

Risenberg switched on the front and rear lights and gave a low laugh. "Who knows? We might just get out of this alive."

At top speed, we raced down the trail, engine roaring, the carrier shaking and shuddering as it rolled over various sized rocks. Five minutes passed…eight minutes…ten. Then we spotted the enemy carrier, the white light from the washtub-sized moon outlining it and the surrounding rocks in stark, silent clarity.

"I estimate they're not more than a quarter of a mile ahead," I said. "We'll try to pull alongside of them and our men in back can start throwing grenades. Thank God the rear of these carriers doesn't have a roof." I turned and yelled to the Israelis in back. "We've sighted them. Stay down and be careful. I'll join you when we get closer."

An unpleasant thought struck me:
Within an hour, either the mission will have succeeded or I'll be dead.

The distance between the two personnel carriers grew less and less. On both sides of us were small hummocks of various sizes, some long and sloping, others short and rounded at the top, or almost square, the entire conglomeration a laminate of sandstone mixed with granite, basalt and some shale. At all levels were the dark maws of cave openings.

We were about three hundred yards behind Karameh's carrier when it pulled up to a stop. The side hatches of the cab and the rear hatch of the personnel section were thrown open and men jumped out and began running toward a cave to the left.

Risenberg and I saw why the carrier had come to a halt. The road had ended against a pile of slab rock at the base of a large hillock. It was a reasonable conclusion that the cave had been Karameh's final destination. To me, it was damned ridiculous.

"What do you make of it, Carter?" Risenberg's voice was one big question mark. "For Karameh to come all this way to take refuge in a cave doesn't make sense!"

The answer suddenly hit me with the force of a bullet in the back!

"Quickly," I said. "Head up the left side of one of the slopes. I have a hunch the cave is nothing but a tunnel."

Risenberg glanced to the left. The slopes on that side weren't half as steep as the one we had descended several miles back. From bottom to top maybe a hundred feet. However, the summit didn't look very inviting, some of the rocks half the size of a small house.

Without any hesitation, Risenberg turned the carrier to the left and gunned the motor. I yelled to the men in back, "Hang on. We're going up the side of a hill."

Risenberg said, "Suppose they are going through a tunnel! Do you think…?" He let his voice dangle off and grinned from ear to ear.

"A helicopter! That's it!" I almost yelled.

"Let's hope the tunnel is a long one," he added. Risenberg headed the personnel carrier up the incline, moving the vehicle as fast as the rocky terrain would permit. Soon we reached the top of the hill and were rolling and bouncing toward the slope on the other side. The journey was not a smooth one. In places there were titanic stepping stones, smoothed by rain and windblown sand, and the carrier had to be guided between them.

Neither of us had forgotten that Karameh and his people were one thousand feet ahead of us. It would have been to our advantage if Joe had been able to drive the carrier at an angle that would have put us in the vicinity of the tunnel's mouth. Such a maneuver was not possible; picking our way through the rocks would have cost us too much time. Better to head straight across the top and take the risk that, once we had reached the bottom of the other slope, we'd be able to drive forward and be in time to cut off the Hawk.

Risenberg chose the route that offered the least resistance; it was unfortunate that it was also the widest area of the top, slightly more than a quarter of a mile. When we finally reached the edge, Risenberg left the engine idling and got out of the cab, to take a look.

I was more impatient than a new bride as he climbed through the side hatch and sat back down. "What's it look like? Did you see any sign of a chopper?"

"The slope will be easy," he replied, shifting gears. "It's like the other side: steep but not too steep. At the bottom, it all looks like sand. No doubt an ancient riverbed. I think there's a canopy in the distance. I'm not sure."

"If there is a canopy, then there has to.be an eggbeater underneath it," I said. "We'll soon know."

We didn't have any difficulty going down the slope, the slant being rather gentle, although there were some jagged rocks which Risenberg carefully avoided. At the bottom, Risenberg turned to the right and pressed down on the gas. We both felt that we had just won a million dollar lottery, for now that we were on more or less level ground we could see that underneath the canopy were two helicopters. But we were still too far away to make out their size and passenger capacity.

"Listen. I'm going back and let the others know exactly what is happening," I said. "Karameh and his people are still in the tunnel or they'd be yanking the canopy off the choppers. Their best protection was the armored car and we blew it to hell and back."

"None of us know how to fly a helicopter," Risenberg said. "How about you. Carter? I don't suppose you can!"

"You suppose wrong." I got out of the co-driver's seat and began moving to the oval opening in the rear of the cab. "We'll fly to Jordan. But first things first. You park in front of the choppers, with the front of the carrier pointed toward the entrance of the tunnel."

Risenberg looked wonderingly at me. "In front! That will put us over ninety feet from the cave. Why so far away?"

I went to the hatch, paused and turned to him. "We can keep them bottled up in the tunnel with the Czech ZB30. At that distance we can cut them down if they try to rush us from the cave and use grenades. Neither of us need a crystal ball to know what Karameh will do once we bottle him up at this end!"

He swung around and stared knowingly at me and for a moment our eyes locked. "They can use their carrier to climb the slope the same as we did. They can stay up there and fire down on us or else come down and battle it out. We'd end up with — what is your American expression?"

"A Mexican standoff," I said, smiling. "But I don't intend to let that happen."

Risenberg didn't reply. He only pushed down harder on the gas.

I squeezed my way through the hatch and hurriedly explained the situation to Wymann, Solomon and Elovitz, the four of us hanging onto the metal benches to keep from being tumbled about the boxlike section.

"Flying out of here sounds good," Wymann said equably, "but what can we gain by keeping Karameh and his killers bottled up in this end of the tunnel?"

Elovitz nodded pensively. "I say fly to Jordan and be done with this entire business. We've been through enough."

Ben Solomon glanced at me and shook his head, a smile of superior amusement twisting the corners of his mouth. "We can't escape to Jordan until Mohammed Bashir Karameh is dead. Our friend Carter is an American intelligence agent and has a job to do. Isn't that right, Carter?"

This was one of those times when a half-truth could serve better than a full lie. "Hamosad wants the SLA destroyed at all costs," I said. "You are Israelis, aren't you? You don't have any choice. You must help — or stop calling yourselves men."

"You're with Hamosad?" Elovitz's tone and manner indicated that he didn't believe I was.

"If you want to know about Israeli intelligence, ask Risenberg," I snapped. "But you'll do it later. We don't have time at the moment for a round table discussion."

"We'll help," Solomon said quickly. "It's only that I don't see what the five of us can do against all of them. It was different when we had the tank. Then we had the firepower and were protected by armor."

"I've a plan," I said, "and I think the odds are with us."

Elovitz chuckled. "If you were Jewish, there are many in Israel who would call you a
Lamedvovnik."

I didn't know whether I was being complimented or insulted. "And what is
Lamedvovnik?"

A lilt to his raspy voice, Elovitz explained that a
Lamedvovnik
was a secret saint. "Ultra-Orthodox Jews believe that the very existence of the world depends on the righteousness of such men," he said, "and that their personal virtue stays God's hands from destroying the world."

I didn't have time to tell Elovitz that I was not a likely candidate for secret sainthood in any religion. Risenberg's voice bellowed back to us from the cab, "The SLA! They're coming out of the tunnel!"

I jumped to the platform on the left side of the hatch and pulled back the cocking knob of the Czech ZB30. I saw that five Syrians had run from the mouth of the cave and were halfway to the two helicopters, three of them swinging assault rifles around toward the carrier. I didn't even bother to line up my eyes with the ball sight in the center of the ring at the end of the barrel. I squeezed the trigger, the roar of the machine gun a fatal symphony, the last sound heard by the five terrorists who were knocked off their feet by the high velocity 7.92mm. Other SLA guerrillas, who were about to come out of the cave, jumped back inside, only seconds before I swung the ZB30 and chopped the sides and the entrance with a few hundred more slugs.

We were close to the two helicopters now. One was a Russian L-15, a twenty passenger job; the other, an L-17, was a gunship with rocket pods on each side and heavy machine guns mounted on both port and starboard. Maybe this was how Karameh had intended to finish us off. We couldn't have mounted any defense against rockets.

The four of us hung on for dear life as Risenberg turned the carrier sharply to the right. He stopped, then backed up and braked again. We were fifty feet in front of the helicopters and a hundred and twenty-five feet directly in front of the ragged mouth of the cave.

I saw a few heads pop out from one side of the entrance and fired a short burst, the big slugs striking the rock and throwing up clouds of chips and dust.

Risenberg came through the driver's rear hatch, wiping his face. I motioned for Solomon to take over the Czech ZB30. I stepped down from the platform and he took my place, careful to keep his head and torso behind the square armored shield mounted to the machine gun.

"We have that Mexican standoff," Risenberg said to me, tight-lipped. "We can't get to them and they can't reach us, at least not until Karameh wises up and goes back to get his carrier."

Wymann's voice was wistful. "It would be easy to throw off the canvas covering and fly out." His eyes, on me, were stern. "We heard you say you could pilot a helicopter."

"We'd never make it." I said. "They'd fill us full of slugs while we were lifting off. What we have to do is eliminate as many of them as possible before they have a chance to go back through the tunnel and get their carrier."

"There isn't any way we can go in after them," Risenberg said, "at either end of the tunnel. They'd cut us down before we could take a step."

"Solomon could keep them down inside with bursts of slugs," I said. "In the meantime, several of us can dash to one side of the cave."

The four Israelis stared at me as if I had grown a second head.

"That's no strategy, Carter!" Elovitz said angrily. "That's suicide! They'd put so much lead in us it would take a crane to lift our bodies. There's no way we can get inside that cave."

I didn't blame the Israelis for thinking I wasn't playing with a full deck. Charging the cave would have been an idiot method; it would have meant certain death.

"You're absolutely right," I agreed. "But I didn't say anything about going inside." I reached into my pocket and took out the tube containing Pierre.