Thunderstrike in Syria (8 page)

I had the horrible feeling that I was in a whirlpool and drowning! The nightmare then became reality and, as I regained consciousness, I realized that the «drowning» had been caused by water thrown into my face. The cobwebs vanished from my mind and I found that I was on my back, my wrists handcuffed behind me, staring up at a circle of hate-filled faces. Except Miriam's: Her expression was one of contempt and amusement.

"It was a good try, Nick," she smirked. She tapped her cigarette, dropping ash in my face. "But as you Americans are fond of saying, 'you can't win them all. »

"I really haven't lost this one yet," I shot back at her. "The game is still not over." I noticed that Hugo had been unstrapped from my arm. Without him and Wilhelmina, I felt almost naked. But not quite. I still had Pierre, my gas bomb.

"It's over for you, Nick," Miriam said matter-of-factly. "You're a dead man, dear. It will be up to you how we kill you, either quickly or very slowly and painfully." She reached out and grabbed the forearm of a SLA sadist who had been about to kick me in the ribs. "Stop! We want to keep our guest in good health," she sneered, looking back down at me. "The stronger he is, the longer we'll be able to torture him."

She nodded to two of the terrorists and they reached underneath my arms and jerked me to my feet.

"Clever the way you lured me here," I said to her. "But it seems to me that you and your people went to a lot of trouble. The SLA could just as easily have grabbed me back in Damascus."

"Yes, we could have," she said lazily, stepping away from me, "but we had no way of knowing if AXE or Hamosad had agents watching to see if you and I left the shop. We couldn't take the risk. You and I had to leave in the van. It was convenient enough, since
al-Huriya
wanted you brought here, to his base."

"Oh, now I feel honored," I said with a chuckle. Suddenly without a warning of any kind, one of the terrorists, a skinny man with a long blue-red scar on one cheek, slapped me hard across the face. Evidently the man hadn't liked my last remark.

Pretending to ignore the stinging pain, I looked at Miriam, who acted as if nothing had happened. "Yeah, honored," I quipped, "even if Karameh didn't send me an engraved invitation."

"Don't flatter yourself, Nick." She was no longer smiling. "We wanted any agent that AXE or Hamosad might send. I will say that we were hoping it would be an agent of AXE and we were hoping that the agent would be you. Naturally we could only wait and see."

One of the men, a heavyset thug with a small beard and beady eyes, spoke to Miriam. From the respectful tone of his voice, I deduced that she was one of Karameh's top people.

"What about our dead comrades?" the man asked her, glaring at me and then looking around him at the bodies on the ground. Of the others that I had wrecked, the man I had hit in the abdomen was sitting on a small rock holding his stomach; the man whose ribs I had broken could hardly stand.

"We'll leave them here," Miriam told the beady-eyed man. "Men from camp can come back and pick them up later. The important thing now is to get this stupid AXE agent to
al-Huriya.
How far away are the jeeps?"

"About a mile to the north," the man replied. "We didn't want to take any chances of his discovering us."

"Yes, that was wise," Miriam agreed. "Very well, we'll go." She turned to another man. "Halif, you go back down to the wadi and drive the van."

We began the walk to the jeeps, Miriam beside me, to my left. To my right, a Syrian kept me covered with a Stechkin machine pistol. Behind me were two more men who, every now and then, poked me in the back with the muzzles of assault rifles.

"There is just one thing I don't understand, I said to Miriam. I knew there had to be a beeper; there wasn't any way. "How did your people know we'd be at this spot today. We could have had engine trouble and have been a day late. We'd have been here earlier if it hadn't been for the bandit attack."

"I thought you would have guessed, Nick," laughed Miriam. "There's a hidden transmitter in the van that emits a steady pulsating signal for tracking purposes, in this case for thirteen miles. You're an expert with such devices. You figure out the rest."

"Someone followed us from Damascus," I said. "Your people never lost track of us."

"Give the man a cigar," she said. "It was easy for my comrades to deduce when we would reach the wadi." She laughed again, reached into her pocket, pulled out a cigarette lighter and held it up for me to see. "Before we began the climb, I activated this. It was easy for the men to keep track of us."

I knew that part of the lighter was a «beeper» of short range.

"You see, Nick, we Arabs aren't half as stupid as you Westerners think we are…"

We continued in silence, and the thought came to me that the great charm of fanaticism is that, like love, it's a great simplifier. It combines the virtue of explaining nothing with the vice of interpreting everything.

I didn't underestimate my position.
I was in the hands of the most dangerous fanatics in the world.

As the jeeps roared into camp, I knew how the early Christians in ancient Rome must have felt when they were about to be tossed to the lions. Nonetheless, my apprehension didn't interfere with my noting the various features of the base. I saw that there was another road leading from the camp, other than the main route that led to the one Miriam told me had been blocked by a landslide. This new road was smaller in width and seemed to lead off into the hills.

I didn't exactly get a cheering welcome! There was pure hatred in the eyes of everyone whose stares I met; some of the men even shook their weapons at me. I saw that most of the men and women displayed the habitual mixture in dress, many were outfitted in Western garb with the traditional forms of headgear, while others wore strictly Arab clothing. Some of the women even wore the chadri, a light black garment, part of which was used as a veil.

Some dirty-faced children yelled obscenities at me as Miriam and her gun-toting aides marched me to a huge black goatskin tent and shoved me inside.

It was easy to spot Mohammed Bashir Karameh, although I had never seen a photograph of the man. AXE and Hamosad didn't know what he looked like. Unlike many other Arab terrorist leaders, Karameh reputedly had a passion for anonymity. We suspected that his real reason was more practical: as a precaution against assassination.

I figured the man positioned so confidently at the head of the large circle of men sitting on cushions must be Karameh. But I did recognize the man seated to
al-Huriya's
right — Ahmed Kamel, Miriam's brother.

Miriam went over to a table and placed Wilhelmina and Hugo in a wooden chest; then she hurried to Karameh and her brother and sat down on a cushion between the two men and began whispering to the SLA leader. Several of my guards shoved me roughly to my knees in the center of the circle, one remaining behind me, the muzzle of his assault rifle pressed against the back of my neck.

Karameh motioned to the man. "It is not necessary that you keep your weapon on him," he said in a well-modulated voice. "He's not in any condition to cause us trouble."

"My leader, this swine is extremely dangerous!" protested the guard. "He killed two of our comrades. Another man died before we could get him to camp. This man" — he poked me with the assault rifle — "is a devil."

Karameh stared at me for a moment, then turned to Miriam Kamel.

"It's true," she admitted. "He's Nick Carter, but he's not superhuman. As you can see, he's handcuffed, and I doubt that he can snap steel."

"In my opinion, he should have been killed on the spot," Ahmed Kamel growled. A roundish man with blotched skin, he was as ugly as his sister was good looking.

Karameh waved the guard away and looked at me with serious eyes. Dressed in dark green fatigues and wearing two pistols on his belt, he was muscular, with an intelligent, yet slightly-cruel looking, face. Well groomed, he had dark wavy hair, long sideburns and a neatly trimmed mustache. But instantly I spotted his weakness — vanity! It shone from his eyes and was evident in the tilt of his chin, held a bit too high.

"You are Nick Carter," he said, his voice crisp but not unfriendly.

"He'll deny it," Miriam snapped. "But he can't deny he's an agent of AXE. The AXE tattoo is on his inner right elbow."

I saw no reason to play games. "I'm Carter," I said in Arabic, smiling slightly at Karameh who sat ten feet in front of me. "And you are Mohammed Karameh, better known as the Hawk. Personally, I think chicken would be a much better appellation. You seem to be terrified of letting the world know what you look like."

There was an angry muttering from many of the men in the circle, one of them, short and stocky with traces of a black beard and deep-set eyes, warning me in a snarling voice, "Careful, pig. We will not tolerate any of your insolence!"

I assumed the man was Khalil Marras, since he was sitting next to Karameh. As for the Hawk, if I had insulted him, he didn't show it. His face remained pleasant and he only laughed a soft, long sound.

"Have patience, Khalil," he said, looking straight at me. "Mr. Carter thinks that by using foolish insults he can impress us with his bravery. Pay no attention to his braying. The camel does not bow before the jackass."

He smiled without amusement and when he spoke to me his voice carried more than a slight trace of annoyance.

"Yes, Carter, I am Mohammed Bashir Karameh. At the moment I'm curious as to how you must feel knowing that you have failed, to realize that we have outsmarted AXE and the Hamosad. It must be terribly frustrating to know there isn't anything you can do about it."

"I don't believe there ever was a plot involving any explosion on U.S. soil." I hoped that by taunting him, his own egotism would force him to tell me what I wanted to know. "I'll admit that you fooled Hamosad, but we in AXE were always skeptical about the liquified natural gas plot. The SLA doesn't have the sophistication of organization for such a complicated scheme."

Miriam and Ahmed Kamel glared at me. Khalil Marras sneered, his thick lips going back over his teeth in a grimace. Karameh, sitting cross-legged, leaned forward, peered intently at me, and put his hands on his knees.

"I had expected more from the famous Nick Carter," he said. "But all you have shown is an amazing lack of imagination. That's the trouble with all Western intelligence agencies. They are constantly underestimating us, thinking we Arabs are still living in the Middle Ages of ignorance."

"Listen, Karameh," I said in my most sincere voice. "I've failed and I admit it. But though I'm your prisoner, don't try to insult my intelligence by telling me fairy tales. If there was an actual LNG plot, Miriam never would have leaked it to AXE."

I could tell I was getting somewhere when Karameh smiled and seemed pleased with himself.

"We might have believed the story," I continued, "if you hadn't made the mistake of saying that the home port of the supertanker was the Soviet Union. That was a bit too much for us to swallow. There isn't any way you could slip any of your people on board a single vessel in the Soviet Union much less one of their supertankers. The Soviet Union is a very closed society and the KGB is very good, almost as good as AXE!"

Karameh beamed. I added quickly, "And don't tell me that the KGB is helping you. That would be even more absurd. The Soviets are too cunning to involve themselves in such a ridiculous scheme."

"You're a fool, Carter. However, you are right about the Soviets."

I reflected that his voice had taken on a different quality; not exactly defiance, but more like pride.

"You're wasting your time," I sneered. "I'm right, too, when I say the LNG deal was a false leak to cover up something else. AXE and Hamosad suspected the same thing. Too bad I won't be able to get back to Tel Aviv to confirm their suspicions."

"That is correct! You won't be leaving this base alive."

I detected savage pleasure in Karameh's voice, a kind of revenge.

"And because you are never going to leave here alive, I'll tell you the full truth. The liquid gas plot was not a smoke screen. Miriam merely lied about the facts. The supertanker doesn't belong to the Soviet Union. It's owned by Libya and will leave from Tripoli. Three of my men will be aboard the crew. It is they who will plant the explosive devices which will explode when the tanker is in the harbor of Galveston, in your state of Texas."

Miriam placed a hand on Karameh's shoulder. "Why tell him anything? Why give him the satisfaction of knowing our real plans."

"I agree," Ahmed Kamel quickly agreed. "Let us proceed with what we must do with the dog, then kill him. He is too dangerous to let live for any extended length of time."

I saw Karameh stiffen, almost imperceptibly.
You should have kept your big mouth shut, bitch!
I thought.
You don't tell a crackpot like him what to do!

"I made all the decisions," Karameh said arrogantly, "and I want Carter to go to his death knowing that I,
al-Huriya,
am twice as clever as any Zionist in Hamosad or any American imperialist."

"If you ask me," I said, "you're treating Colonel al-Qaddafi pretty dirty. I can't buy it! Qaddafi's a Moslem the same as you and his Libya is still a paradise for every crackpot terrorist on the face of the earth. Yet you expect me to believe that you're going to blow up one of his two hundred million dollar tankers in Galveston!

I enjoyed looking at Miriam. She hadn't expected her boss to rebuff her. Now she sat as if stunned, the skin around her mouth tight and pale.

Looking cold-eyed at me, Karameh said scornfully, "Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi is a traitor to the entire Moslem world. He has billions of dollars from oil at his disposal; yet he has done nothing all these years but talk and make empty threats. He could have invaded Egypt but didn't. He could have killed Sadat, who is even a worse traitor. He wants to make peace with the Zion imperialists in Israel!"