Trader of Secrets: A Paul Madriani Novel (45 page)

*  *  *

We could hear the crack of gunfire punctuated by the bass thump of occasional larger explosions. Suddenly, as we came around a bend, we saw smoke.

“Slow down,” says Harry.

“I want to see what’s happening,” I tell him. I hit the accelerator and he hangs on.

“Be careful,” says Joselyn.

Just as she says the words, I round another bend and find myself staring at a brick guard kiosk in the middle of the road. The heavy iron drop gate is down, but no one appears to be in the hut.

“Hang on!” I pull forward and do a sweeping turn in front of the hut in case we have to pull away in a hurry. The guardhouse is empty. I turn off the engine and grab the binoculars.

A few seconds later Harry and I are out of the car. I am standing perched with my toes on the threshold of the open driver’s-side door looking over the roof of the vehicle through the hundred-power field glasses.

“What do you see?” asks Joselyn.

“It’s a plane. It’s on fire,” I tell them. “Sons of bitches are shooting at it. Oh shit!”

“What is it?” says Harry.

“Lift the barrier!” I tell him.

“What? Where are you going?”

“Just do it!” I toss the binoculars to Joselyn, jump behind the wheel, and start the engine.

Before Harry can lift the gate, the car is spitting gravel from the back tires swinging around in a full turn. He lifts the balanced metal pipe. I pull forward and he jumps back in the car. Before his door is closed we’re moving again.

Chapter
Sixty-One

A
din saw the three of them huddled like orphans on the naked tarmac, Sarah, Herman, and the wounded squad machine gunner. He wondered where the dog was, worried that he might have gotten left on the plane. But it was too late now.

“Ready?” He yelled to the loader on the back of the Jeep.

“Do it!” said the man.

Adin spun the Jeep around one more time and headed back toward the twenty-millimeter gun. If he could knock out their last big weapon, Ben Rabin and his men might have a chance to advance on the building even under the withering small-arms fire.

The two remaining props spinning in reverse blew a wall of thick black smoke across the runway ahead of the plane. Adin used it as a screen to close the distance on the twenty-millimeter gun.

By the time the front of the flying Jeep emerged from the wall of dense black smoke, they were less than sixty meters from the sandbagged gun emplacement.

Adin swerved to the left and hit the brakes as the gunner swiveled the barrel of the recoilless rifle and took aim.

The gunner sitting on the back of the twenty-millimeter tripod saw them at the last second. He tried to bring the muzzle of the gun to bear, his thumb over the trigger as the flash of the explosion blew him out of the chair. Boxes of twenty-millimeter cannon rounds exploded inside the ring of sandbags.

The loader on the recoilless rifle was yelling and screaming, hanging on with one hand as small-arms fire tattooed the metal on the rear of the Jeep. Before Adin could hit the accelerator, two AK rounds ripped into the man’s chest, blowing him off the back of the vehicle.

Adin turned. One look and he knew the man was dead. He hit the accelerator and raced toward the screen of the smoke as bullets flicked off the concrete, chasing him across the runway. One of them snapped past his ear and hit the windscreen in front of him. The bullet shattered, sending shrapnel from the copper cladding into his forehead and cheek. Adin turned the wheel just a little. He changed course to force the shooters to reacquire their target. The adjustment gave him the time he needed to blow through the wall of smoke. Once behind it he jogged again, this time to prevent a late shot from tracking him blindly through the screen.

The massive shock wave rocked the Jeep as the fuel tank inside the plane exploded. Shards of aluminum and steel were blown into the air. A mushrooming black cloud roiled upward and rolled open in a ball of orange flame three hundred feet in the sky.

Adin saw the three of them pulling back from the flaming wreck, Herman pulling the wounded SAW gunner away from the spreading fuel-driven fire as Sarah struggled under the weight of the machine gun and the heavy ammo bag to keep them both out of the flames.

Under the end of the burning plane, Adin could see Ben Rabin and his men fighting to right the ammo trailer before the massive tail section collapsed onto it.

He turned the Jeep toward Sarah and Herman and raced across the concrete runway. The vehicle skidded to a stop right next to the three of them.

Adin set the brake and jumped out. He grabbed the wounded soldier by the feet. Together he and Herman loaded the man into the back of the Jeep under the barrel of the recoilless rifle. Adin took the machine gun from Sarah and handed it to the wounded commando and asked him if he could still shoot.

The man smiled and nodded. He set his back against the bolted rifle mount and steadied the machine gun over the left rear wheel well of the Jeep.

Adin put Sarah in the back behind the right seat, told her to lie flat and keep her head down. “Can you drive?” He looked at Herman.

Herman glanced at the stick shift, standard four-speed ahead with a fifth gear for overdrive. “Sure. What are you gonna do?”

“I’m going to be working the rifle,” said Adin. “We need to take out the two big dishes,” he told Herman.

“Let’s do it.” Herman jumped behind the wheel, released the brake, and started feeling the controls to get used to them. “Tell me when you’re ready.”

Hirst climbed on the back and loaded one of the self-propelled rounds into the recoilless rifle, then closed the breach. There were only three more recoilless rounds left in the Jeep. The rest were in the ammo trailer. Adin tried to peer through the smoke but couldn’t see what was happening under the tail of the plane. “We’ll take the big dish first.” Then he told Herman to hit it. “Go!”

*  *  *

Ben Rabin struggled with the heavy metal trailer, trying to tip it back onto its wheels as the flames burned from the plane’s tail section over their heads. The Israelis desperately needed the two mortars stored inside the trailer. They couldn’t get at them because the compartment where they were stored was buried under the trailer.

Ben Rabin had been hit twice in the upper body, through-and-through flesh wounds that hurt and bled. But there was no time to worry about them. Four of his men were already dead. Three more were wounded. There were only a dozen of them left including himself.

He tried to guess at the number of troops firing back and estimated their force to be at least three times the strength of the Shayetet. Normally that might give an enemy almost even odds except for the fact that the Israelis had lost the element of surprise and were now stranded out on the naked runway.

What they needed was some way to close the distance on the building under the large saucerlike dish. But the seventy yards of bald concrete between the burning plane and the building was a killing zone. Two of his men had already died trying to cross it. Without cover, the withering fire raked the surface of the concrete all the way across the runway and into the brush five hundred meters away on the other side.

The enemy kept bouncing rounds into the upturned bottom of the trailer. Sooner or later they would hit something hot inside and the entire ammunition train would go up, along with it most of his men. Ben Rabin needed something to turn the tide; otherwise they would all die here on the tarmac.

*  *  *

“What are they doing here?” asks Harry.

“I don’t know, but Herman I couldn’t miss,” I tell him. “I’m sure it was Sarah on the ground next to him. I only got a glimpse, but I could tell it was her.”

“Doubt if there would be another duo like that,” said Harry.

“Who would bring them down here?” asks Joselyn.

“I’ll be sure and ask the minute I catch up with them,” I tell her.

“They must have been on the plane,” she says.

“That’s what I am thinking.”

The sky in front of us suddenly erupts in a billowing black cloud. A second later the shock wave jolts the car.

“Shit!” says Harry. He peers through the windshield with an expression of fright.

We race along the road, my heart pounding as we speed toward the runway down on the flat about a half mile away.

“I’m going to stop up ahead and let both of you out,” I tell them.

“No, you’re not,” says Harry. “You want, you can let Joselyn out, that’s fine.”

“Screw you,” she tells him.

“No sense all of us getting killed,” I say.

“What are you going to do?” asks Harry.

“I’ll know when I get there.”

“You don’t even know what’s going on,” says Harry.

“It’s easy enough to tell friend from foe when they’re shooting at your daughter,” I tell him.

“You don’t have a gun.”

“No, but I have a rental car,” I tell him. “I’ll drop the two of you off and you can tell Hertz that I’m sorry.”

“You’re not listening. We’re not getting out,” says Joselyn.

“You’re crazy,” I tell her.

“So are you,” she says.

“I’m not going to argue with you,” I tell her.

“Then shut up and drive,” she says.

“Listen to the lady.” Harry is busy stretching the band to load up the speargun.

“What are you gonna do with that?” I ask.

“At least I can harbor the illusion I’ve got something to shoot back with.”

“Do me a favor.” I glance back over the seat at Joselyn. “If you’re not getting out, at least get down flat on the floor behind the front seat.”

On this point she does not argue.

I press on the accelerator and we rocket past a line of parked vehicles along the side of the road, all of them empty, security pickups and small sedans with light bars overhead.

“I guess we can assume that all the occupants are out there trying to kill the people on that plane,” says Harry.

“That would be my guess.”

Harry tries to scrunch down into the footwell on the passenger side.

I check my seat belt, pull it tight, and brace myself.

“Don’t you think you’re going pretty fast?”

“You’re the only woman I know who would be worried about speed when a firing squad is about to shoot us.”

“You’re still going too fast,” she says.

“Momentum is our friend.”

A glance at the speedometer tells me I’m clocking a hundred and ten kilometers an hour, something just south of seventy miles per hour.

“Try not to hit anything solid,” says Harry. “The secret is to keep moving.”

“I know.”

“The minute we stop they’ll riddle the car with bullets and kill us all.” Harry’s happy thought for the day.

“It sounds like you’ve done this before,” I tell him.

“Little old ladies in crosswalks,” he says.

We rocket through an open gate. We are by it so fast that I can’t tell if there is a guard in the kiosk or not. Up ahead I see the smoking plane, billows of flames as the entire fuselage is now engulfed. Bullets are flying. There is no sign of Sarah or Herman. With all the smoke I can’t see a thing on the other side of the plane.

My eyes focus on the firing line ahead of me, soldiers in uniform kneeling behind a row of sandbags. There is so much noise and commotion they don’t even see us. Their eyes are riveted on the victims out on the runway.

“Hang on!” I yell.

Chapter
Sixty-Two

T
he oil-laden smoke now lay like a pall across the runway. Herman picked his location carefully, then stomped on the accelerator and drove the Jeep headlong into the drifting black cloud. As soon as he cleared it, he spun the vehicle around, turning to the right. This gave Adin with the recoilless rifle a clear shot from the back end as the man with the squad automatic weapon laid down covering fire from the left side.

The second the Jeep stopped, the SAW opened up. The gunner stitched .30-caliber rounds along the top of the sandbags seventy meters away.

Two of the guards who didn’t get down fast enough ended up taking bullets in the chest and the head. The others ducked.

Sarah covered her ears with her hands in an effort to keep the explosive rattle from the machine gun from blowing her eardrums.

The covering fire gave Adin the time he needed to zero in on the large parabolic antenna.

To blow a hole through the massive reflecting dish wasn’t enough. Adin wanted to nail the smaller boxed antenna that contained the high-end electronics where the radio waves were concentrated and received.

He took careful aim as bullets snapped by his head, then pulled the lanyard and watched as the round streaked across the distance, exploding as it struck the apex of the metal frame holding the antenna in front of the huge concave dish.

Sarah saw a series of sparks spit from the shattered black box as the recoilless round fried the electronics inside. “Go!” Adin dropped to his knees and slapped the side of the Jeep over the back wheel well. He smiled at Sarah and held up one finger. “One more to go.”