Nick Carter

Thunderstrike in Syria

Dedicated to The Men of the

Secret Services of the

United States of America

Chapter One

July is always hot in Israel, and riding in a car that wasn’t air-conditioned only made us more uncomfortable. My main concern was that the heat might cause the makeup on our faces to soften and wreck my scheme for catching off guard the SLA agents in the House of Medals. I wanted to take at least one SLA member alive, more if possible, and Leah Weizmann and I could hardly walk into the religious shop and pose as elderly tourists with greasepaint flowing down our faces. However, the Hamosad makeup experts had assured us that the cosmetics were impervious to heat and perspiration and could only be removed by a special solution of alcohol, glycerol and something called somandaline. Two bottles of the stuff were in the dashboard of the Volvo. The Hamosad makeup boys had been right: I could sweat through the cosmetics and even wipe my face without harming any of the tints or shades or “wrinkles.”

I glanced at Leah who was sitting next to me in the back seat of the Volvo, and marveled at how the Hamosad intelligence experts had transformed both her face and figure. Underneath all the war paint, Leah was a very attractive young woman, a Sabra, a native-born Israeli whose slim body was tanned and curved in all the right places. Her soft hair, as black as a raven’s feathers, curled at the ends but otherwise fell straight and shiny around her face. Her face was beautifully shaped, her sable eyes made large and somewhat dolllike by the long dark lashes. Her mouth was a bit too large, but she had a wonderful smile with a dimple in the left corner. The rest of Leah was built to match — breasts that were full and round, that always seemed to be struggling for release; a slim waist; nicely rounded hips; long, deeply tanned legs that could almost squeeze a man to death in bed.

But now, Leah looked like a woman in hear early sixties, her skin wrinkled, her lips thin and pale, a gray wig covering her own dark hair. Her full breasts had been flattened, her figure padded in strategic places to make her look dumpy, a victim of middle-age spread.

The Israeli makeup experts had worked the same kind of magic on me, adding thirty years to my own face and placing a gray-white wig over my own brown hair. I was still luckier than Leah. I didn’t have to be tortured by any padding under my summer-weight suit. I’m lean and well-muscled and that was enough. And who said that an “old man” has to be fat? As for height, by bending over slightly and using a cane, I could give the impression of not being too tall.

Feeling me watching her, Leah turned to me, her eyes questioning.

“Anything wrong, Nick? Don’t you dare tell me my makeup is starting to run! Yours looks all right.”

I reached down and squeezed her hand. “I was thinking that it’s not going to be easy in the House of Medals,” I said. “Since the clerks are members of the Syrian Liberation Army, they have to be first-class fanatics. People like that would rather die than admit defeat. You shouldn’t be going in there with me.”

Leah shook her head, pushed her knee against mine and looked deeply into my eyes. “We’ve been all through that, Nick,” she said matter-of-factly. “We both know that our chances of pulling this off are better if we stick to the original plan. An elderly couple is not going to arouse suspicion. You know I’m right. So don’t try to talk me out of it. And quit worrying.”

I didn’t try to dissuade Leah from going with me. Nor was I worried; I was concerned. The mission, only a month old, was stalled with dead ends and lack of any real progress. The raid on the religious shop, if successful, would change all the failure. If we could capture just one SLA agent and make him talk, we might be able to develop new leads.

“We’re on the outskirts of Jerusalem,” the Hamosad driver of the Volvo called back. “Another fifteen minutes and we should be there.”

A short-haired man with a thick mustache, the driver was the same man who had contacted Leah and me a week ago. Then he had posed as a cab-driver.

I watched the traffic that was getting heavier from both directions, leaned back and relaxed, my thoughts backtracking to how the mission had begun. I had been enjoying a vacation on a lake in Maine, when a Control Agent had gotten word to me: Hawk wanted to see me in Washington — and fast. I had hurried back, going straight to DuPont Circle where AXE, the super-secret U.S. espionage agency, has its headquarters, under the cover of the Amalgamated Press and Wire Services.

David Hawk hadn’t called me to D.C. to ask about my fishing. Apparently, AXE had learned that the Syrian Liberation Army, a deadly organization of Arab terrorists dedicated to killing every Israeli on the face of the earth, was planning to expand its murderous activities to the U.S. in an attempt to incite the American people enough so they would demand that the government stop giving military aid to Israel.

As Hawk had explained the SLA plan, a large part of it involved the planting of time bombs aboard a supertanker carrying liquified natural gas from the Soviet Union to the United States. The bombs would be set to explode when the giant nine hundred-foot-long vessel entered New York City harbor and started on its way to a specially designed dock near the Arthur Kill, a channel separating Staten Island from New Jersey.

In his growl of a voice, Hawk had rattled off facts and figures, explaining that LNG is natural gas turned into liquid for shipment and storage, with its volume reduced six hundred times by bringing its temperature down to 260 degrees below zero. The liquid rapidly turns to gas when exposed to normal air or water temperatures. Should the tanks rupture in a supertanker, which carries about four million gallons of LNG, the gas would cover an area ten miles long. Normally odorless, colorless and tasteless, the Death Cloud, with a temperature of about one-hundred sixty degrees below zero at its center, would freeze enough water vapor to become visible — if the spill were over water. But should a single spark touch the cloud, it would explode into raging flames, incinerating everything beneath it. If the cloud did not explode, it would freeze anything that came in contact with it, or it would suffocate anyone who did not freeze first.

Then Hawk had given me the worst news of all: Such a death cloud, whether it exploded or not, could kill as many as one million people!

My assignment was to find out the name of the supertanker, how the bombs, or bomb, were to be planted, and the names of the SLA agents who would plant them.

Where would I begin? Hawk had provided the answer before I could ask him. AXE had acquired the full cooperation of the Hamosad, the Israeli Intelligence Service. No, Hawk had explained, I wouldn’t fly directly to Israel. Instead, I would go to London and there make contact with a woman operative of Hamosad. Posing as husband and wife, we’d use the cover that we were Britishers on a vacation to the Holy Land. And how would I find this Israeli Mata Hari in merry ole England? All I had to do, Hawk had said, was register as “Charles Heines” at the Mount Royal Hotel in the exclusive Mayfair district. In fact, an AXE agent in London had already made reservations for me.

Leah Weizmann had found me, the same day that I had registered.

Three days later, Leah and I had taken a BOAC flight to Israel and were in the Samuel Hotel in Tel Aviv, in a suite of rooms overlooking the sunny Mediterranean. Personally, it was an arrangement I enjoyed, especially since Leah’s reasoning was as pragmatic as my own. We had registered at the Samuel as “Mr. and Mrs. Charles Heines”; our passports said we were “Mr. and Mrs. Charles Heines.” Why not enjoy the arrangement? Besides, the bedroom of the suite had only one king-sized bed.

Leah and I were under cover in more ways than one. Under no circumstances were we to go to Hamosad headquarters in the Histadrut Building. Hamosad would contact us and had done so as Leah and I had toured Tel Aviv, or Tel Aviv Yafo as the Israelis call their main city. Often our contact had been another “tourist,” or a “guide”; at other times, a “cabdriver.”

During those weeks, our Hamosad contacts had kept Leah and me informed of developments. The catch was that there hadn’t been any developments. All Hamosad had learned was that SLA headquarters was based somewhere in Syria and that its leader was Mohammed Bashir Karameh, a Palestinian who was an ex-school teacher.

Finally a Hamosad agent had come to the Samuel on a two-fold mission: to deliver an attache case from Hawk and to apprise us of Hamosad’s latest scheme. At the time, the attache case had not been a mystery. I knew it contained Wilhelmina, my 9-millimeter P08 Luger; Hugo, my pencil-thin stiletto; and Pierre, my special gas bomb.

But I hadn’t been prepared for the second part of the agent’s mission. Neither had Leah.

The agent had explained that for almost two months the Shin Bet — uniformed Israeli security — and the Hamosad had been watching an Arab place of business in Jerusalem, a small shop that sold religious items to tourists, items that only Christians would buy. Hamosad believed that the House of Medals was the headquarters of the SLA cell in Jerusalem. In several days the Shin Bet would raid the House of Medals.

I had disagreed completely with the strategy and had informed the Hamosad that one man would have a better chance of capturing members of the Syrian terrorist organization in the shop, than dozens of Shin Bet boys. At first, the big brass in Hamosad had been reluctant, but finally I had persuaded the Israelis to come around to my logic, pointing out that if the Shin Bet surrounded the shop there would be a lot of corpses. It wouldn’t be easy to storm the place. And suppose the SLA crackpots destroyed the shop with explosives? Scores of people would be killed or wounded. Another flaw in the Hamosad’s plan was that there were numerous possibilities of escape from the shop, unless the SLA people inside were taken by surprise. The streets of the Temple Area were as narrow as alleys and they twisted and climbed in crooked patterns. Some of the streets were covered and resembled tunnels. There were all manner of steep passages and declivities. If any of the SLA members escaped to this maze of streets, they’d never be caught. One man would have a better chance of taking the SLA off guard and completing the raid with some measure of success.

What I hadn’t counted on was Leah’s insistence that she go along. Nor had I been able to throw up a counter-argument, for what she had said made sense. If one person had a good chance, then two should be twice as good, especially if they were disguised as an elderly man and woman.

The next day, Leah and I had gone to a Hamosad “safe” house on Derech Hagevura Street, and Hamosad makeup experts had gone to work on us. Three hours later, Leah and I were on our way to Jerusalem.

Chapter Two

The Volvo bounced along over the rough stones of the road.

“We’ll turn on Shlomo Hamelech and enter the Temple Area by way of the New Gate entrance,” the driver called over his shoulder. “The House of Medals is on St. Francis Way.”

“Yes, I know the area,” Leah said. “St. Francis Way is only a short distance from the New Gate Road. Let us out close to the Holy Sepulchre. We’ll walk the rest of the way.”

The driver slowed the car and we proceeded in silence. I had been in Jerusalem before and this was familiar territory to me. Nothing had changed. Hebrew and Arab newspapers were still being sold from the same stands. But cigarettes had risen in price. The Volvo passed a sign: American cigarettes $1.80 a pack.

Slowly, we drove past tiny stalls selling a favorite tidbit, round rolls encrusted with sesame seeds and served with hard-boiled eggs. Other stalls sold gazoz, a raspberry-flavored carbonated water. There were open sheds displaying felafel, a kind of vegetarian meatball made of chick-peas and peppers; and neat Occidental posters advertising Ponds Almond Cream. There were stalls of dried figs, miniature apricots, almonds from the other side of the Jordan, mysterious-looking herbs from India, walnuts, vine leaves, and bright-orange lentils.

Leah turned to me and placed her hand on my arm. “You’ve been very silent, Nick.” Her voice was as soft as rose petals. “But you shouldn’t worry about me. I’ve seen my share of violence.”

I realized that like all Israeli girls Leah had seen service in the small Israeli Army. Just the same, if she came unglued if and when the shooting started, the whole damn deal could fall apart. I was going to have enough to do without having to watch out for her. But only a fool or a philosopher ever tells a woman what he’s really thinking. I was neither.

I looked at Leah and mused, “It’s ironic... some would say sacrilegious, that the SLA should have a cell functioning within the Jerusalem Temple Area, just a short distance from the famous Wailing Wall. On the other hand, the Moslem Dome of the Rock is also close by. I suppose that sort of evens things out.” I lit one of my gold-tipped cigarettes. “Actually, the Wall and the Rock are only symbols, symbols that reach their highest state of power in struggles between good and bad principles of social orders personified in heroes and villains, gods and devils, allies and enemies, and the like. Your Wailing Wall is a good example of symbolism. A million Jews would go out and gladly die to protect that wall, the most precious of all their symbology.”

Leah’s laugh was low and amused. “You’re right, Nick. But don’t say ‘your wall.’ I’m an atheist. But to those who believe, it’s the Wailing Wall, more than anything else, that convinces them that they’re living in the City of God. Yes, the Wall is a symbol. Yet no monument has ever given a people such a collective strength.”

The driver of the car turned his head sideways and said in a voice tense with emotion, “It’s because of the Wall that we Jews in Israel are able to say, ‘We are surrounded by millions of Arabs, but we have no fear.’ ”

I didn’t comment. If the man wanted to believe in a wall of stones that was his business. As far as I was concerned it had been U.S. military aid that so far had saved tiny Israel, not a pile of ancient rocks that, supposedly, had once been part of Solomon’s Temple.

The House of Medals popped up in my mind again. If and when the shooting started, the Shin Bet would make a two-pronged attack on the building, coming in and rushing both the front and back entrances. The trap would be closed, hopefully, on at least one SLA agent. With some forceful persuasion, he or she might provide some clue to the location of SLA headquarters in Syria. If we got really lucky, the captured agent might even have some information about the LNG plot.

The driver called back, “I’m going to have to park up ahead. The streets are getting too narrow. I’m as close as I can get to the Holy Sepulchre.”

Leah checked her large shopping bag resting on the floor of the car. In the bag, underneath a few dummy packages, was an Israeli-made UZI 9mm submachine gun.

I checked to make sure Wilhelmina was resting securely in her shoulder holster, then held up my right arm and looked down my sleeve. Hugo was secure in his chamois case: a flick of my wrist and the stiletto would slide into my hand, handle first.

I took another long drag from the cigarette and flipped it out of the window.

“The way you smoke!” Leah chided. “Don’t you believe the warning of your own Surgeon General?”

“You have it backwards,” I said. “The tobacco industry has determined that it’s the Surgeon General who’s dangerous to the health of smokers. Are you ready?”

Five minutes later, Leah and I were walking along on the ancient stones of St. Francis Way, or rather, we were hobbling as though slowed by the passage of years. While Leah held onto my elbow, I walked with the aid of an old-fashioned hickory cane with a curved handle.

We were ignored by the people brushing past us — tourists from a dozen nations and Arabs wearing the kaffiyeh, the white headdress bound with, black ropes. But some Arabs were dressed in Western — business suits or wearing shirts and slacks; others wore the traditional burnoose, a hooded mantle or cloak. The clothing of the Arab women was equally as diversified, the older women traditionally veiled, the young ones in Western blouses and skirts.

It was easy to spot an Israeli. The men were wearing white shirts, open at the neck. The national costume of Israel, I thought. At least for men. A necktie salesman would starve to death in this small nation. In contrast, the Orthodox Jews wore a long dark tunic, or caftan, and the broad-brimmed hat called a streimel.

“It’s difficult to believe that many of the older people passing us survived Hitler’s death camps and the Judengasse,” Leah said. “I believe that was the German name for ghetto.

“You would, if you were Jewish,” Leah said. “Anyhow, it was Pope Paul IV who established the first Roman ghetto for Jews. But it was the Moslems who pointed the way for the earliest forced segregation — which doesn’t have anything to do with why we’re here, does it?”

Leah laughed as if enjoying some secret joke, and I looked at her with a puzzled expression on my wrinkled face.

“I’m sorry, Nick,” she said. “I was only laughing at fate. A few months ago if someone had told me that I’d be in Jerusalem disguised as an old woman and walking down St. Francis Way with the famous Nick Carter, I would have said impossible. But here I am! Here we are!” Leah sighed. “I suppose it’s all relative. There’s a saying in the Talmud that a baby comes into the world wanting everything, its fist clenched, while a man leaves the world wanting nothing, his hands open. All Israel wants is peace.”

I wasn’t in the mood for philosophy. “Let’s make certain that we don’t go into eternity ten minutes from now, with our hands open and our eyes closed,” I warned. “We’re almost to the shop.”

“Suppose none of the clerks speak English?” Leah asked.

“One of them should, with all the tourist trade they get,” I said.

“But suppose they don’t?”

“Then we’ll have to speak in Arabic.”

“But won’t it seem suspicious for a tourist from the West to speak Arabic?”

“Should it come to that we’ll have to risk it.” I shrugged. “Mental telepathy is out of my line.”

“Well, no matter what,” Leah whispered and gave my arm a little squeeze. “I’m with you all the way.”

The front of the House of Medals was made of stone, and, like tourists everywhere, Leah and I looked at the items displayed in the small, glassed-in window, articles of Roman Catholicism. There were medals and medallions; statues of Christ and His Mother; of the Apostles; of the various saints. There were beautiful lithographed prints; candles of various sizes and shapes; crucifixes and tiny bottles of holy water; round vials containing soil from the Mount of Olives.

I leaned heavily on the cane and whispered, “Listen. Don’t take any chances. You move when I move, understand?”

Leah nodded, and we went into the shop, passing a young couple on their way out.

A sullen-faced young man, who was wearing a clerk’s white coat and whose head was shaved, was behind one counter. An older man, also an Arab and also wearing a white coat, sat on a high stool behind the opposite counter. At the rear of the long room, a pinched-faced woman was arranging brass candlesticks on shelves. The woman, in her forties and reminding me of a spinster from some Victorian novel, glanced up as Leah and I walked in, then returned to her work.

Only a few years older than Leah, which made him about 26 or 27, the dour-faced clerk was brusque to the point of rudeness.

“You will have to please hurry,” he said in heavily accented English. “We are about ready to close for the day.”

I had begun to analyze the setup from the moment I had walked into the place, and already had put together a plan. Close to where the woman was working in the rear, a heavy curtain hung in a large arched doorway. Quite obviously the archway was the entrance to a back room, or to a hallway that led to a back room or a series of rooms.

The clerk was impatient. “Did you hear me, old man?” he said crossly. “We are getting ready to close. You buy now or go.”

With pseudo timidity, I stepped up to the counter and cackled, “Me and my Missus here, we’re interested in a statue of St. Joseph. Like the kind on the shelf there.”

With the tip of my cane, I pointed to a foot-high statue on the shelf behind the clerk, who then turned, picked up the statue and placed it on the marble-topped counter.

I turned to Leah who was playing her part perfectly. “Is this the one you wanted, dear?” I asked.

Leah smiled, nodded and patted my arm.

“One Israeli pound,” the clerk said in a bored voice.

I picked up the plaster-of-Paris statue and pretended to study it, turning slightly, my movement giving me an opportunity to glance in the direction of the other Arab who was behind the opposite counter. Short, heavyset and cruel-looking, the man had gotten off the stool and was leaning against the shelves, his thick arms folded across his chest. He kept looking in my direction. The more he stared, the less I liked him.

I turned to Leah, looked directly into her eyes and silently told her, This is it, baby!

But I said in the voice of a senior citizen, “Check your souvenirs, dear. We’ll put the statue in the bag.”

Nodding, Leah bent down and began to fumble with the dummy packages in the canvas shopping bag, glancing up at me every now and then.

I returned my attention to the clerk and smiled. “Very well, young man. It’s a fine statue. Guess we’ll take it. You needn’t wrap it.”

“One pound,” the clerk said, more sullen than ever.

Nonchalantly, as though reaching for my billfold, I slid my right hand inside my coat, and then went into action. It was now or never! I jerked my hand out from underneath my coat, only now it contained a fistful of Luger. Before the young SLA clerk could put together what was happening, I slammed the barrel against his right temple, knocking him out before he had time to open his mouth. The SLA agent slid to the floor just as I jumped to one side and shoved Leah out of the way. My quick movement saved our lives because the SLA member behind the other counter was extremely fast. I had figured he would be. I could tell by the quick, darting movement of his eyes.

The heavyset man jerked a Soviet 9-millimeter Stechkin machine pistol from underneath the counter and triggered off a stream of fire toward where Leah and I had been standing only seconds before. The line of hot 9mm projectiles stabbed across the room, missed us, but found a resting place behind the counter, shattering a row of St. Joseph statues and a row of Madonna figurines into flying chips of plaster.

In the rear of the shop, the prune-faced woman screamed in Arabic, “WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!” to whoever was in the back section of the shop. Then she reached into an urn and jerked out another Stechkin machine pistol. But I knew that my sudden action had taken her completely by surprise because she reacted more slowly than the terrorist behind the counter.

The Arab woman was swinging the machine pistol toward me and Leah when Wilhelmina roared, her 9mm 110 grain bullet catching the heavyset SLA man just above the bridge of the nose and knocking him backward against the shelves. With a round hole in its lower forehead, the corpse sank to the floor, eyes wide open, staring at nothing.

Leah had surprised me. She had been as quick as a bolt of lightning. During those few blinks of time, she had jerked the UZI submachine gun from the shopping bag and had triggered off a short burst of 9 mm slugs that hit the elderly woman squarely in the chest. The blast of hot copper-gilded lead slammed the woman backward through the heavy red curtain that divided the shop from the back room. Practically tom apart by the UZI slugs, the corpse of the Arab woman crumpled to the floor, the curtain half-wrapped around her like a flowing shroud.

In a low crouch, I whispered fiercely to Leah, “Get down behind the counter to the right. I’ll take the left side and we’ll work our way toward the back. Stay down until I make my move.”

Her face grim, Leah nodded, then jumped behind the counter. I leaped over the top of the counter to the left and began to crawl toward the rear of the shop, the pungent odor of burnt cordite stinging my nostrils.

The young Arab I had knocked out with Wilhelmina lay like a log, a long bloody gash on his temple. I hoped I hadn’t killed him. Just to make sure, I felt for his pulse. Good. He was still alive. Whatever information the man possessed, Hamosad interrogators would pull it out of him.

Leah and I were still not out of the woods. I reached the end of the counter and cautiously poked out my head. Six feet away, to my right, was the arched entrance to the rear of the shop. The dead Arab woman was lying on her back, torrents of blood pouring from her chest, flowing down to the floor. A Stechkin machine pistol lay next to her.

I decided to rush the back room and motioned for Leah to fire a round at the top of the archway. That would prevent its occupants, if any, from possibly escaping by the front; if they took a rear route, the Shin Bet would grab them. Leah nodded, then pointed the stubby barrel of the UZI upward. At the same time, we heard shrill police whistles from outside the shop. The Shin Bet was getting ready to rush the House of Medals.

With Wilhelmina ready in my hand and a prayer in my pocket. I tensed myself and gave Leah the go-ahead sign. She triggered the UZI, the short burst of 9 mm slugs stabbing into the back room, a foot or so below the arched entrance.

Now that the curtain was down, I could see that beyond the wide archway was a small open area, empty except for an ordinary wooden chair against the right wall. Ahead, six feet from the chair, was another arched doorway, this one narrow and covered with a green curtain.

I didn’t like the setup; yet there was no other way to do it. I first put six of Wilhelmina’s bullets through the green curtain. Then I put a fresh clip into the Luger, cocked the old girl, leaped up and zigzagged into the small area, throwing myself against the wall next to the chair.

With Wilhelmina all set to fire, I picked up the chair to my left, crept forward along the wall and then tossed the chair through the doorway, its momentum tearing off the green curtain. I dove into the room, right behind the chair, at the same instant that a man fired a couple of Military Mauser slugs at the chair, the 7.63mm bullets ripping through the seat.

I threw myself to one side, my eyes making an instant survey of what appeared to be a storage room. There were two SLA gunmen in the room, the one with the Spanish-type Mauser dressed in burnoose and kaffiyeh, the second man wearing a gaudily colored sports shirt and yellow pants.

The Arab dressed in Western clothes was sitting on a packing crate, his finger furiously working a Cytex code key. On top of the crate was a shortwave set. But the man stopped clicking the key and reached for a pistol when he saw me.

In that half a second, the Arab who had hit the chair, spun around and fired as I ducked to one side. The bullet sizzled a foot to my left and slammed into a crate standing against the wall. The blob of copper-coated lead must have hit a nailhead because it ricocheted with a screaming whine, stabbed across the room and buried itself in the opposite wall.

I dodged once more and twice pulled the Luger’s trigger. The Arab in burnoose and kaffiyeh jumped and jerked, an expression of shock freezing on his dark face. A small dark hole appeared in the center of his chest; the SLA terrorist was dead before he crashed to the floor.

Worried about the man dressed in Western clothes by the code key — he still hadn’t fired — I started to drop flat, firing at him by sheer instinct. Frantically he snapped off a shot with an Italian Glisenti automatic. The bullet burned high through the left side of my suit coat, tore through my shirt and left a graze on the skin of my left shoulder, a momentary streak of agony that interfered with my own aim. Instead of Wilhelmina’s 9mm hitting the Arab in the chest, it plowed into his mouth, moved upward at an angle and tore off the top of his skull. The Glisenti automatic fell from his dead fingers and he dropped to the floor, the corpse sitting down flat, leaning against a packing case, the mouth cavern-like in a silent scream.

I jumped to my feet and listened to the terrible silence. Silence? Not quite a full and complete silence. There was another sound, a familiar one that made me shiver. It was a loud ticking, similar to the ticking of an alarm clock, and it could mean only one thing: the SLA fanatics had booby-trapped the place. I could think of only one question: How soon before the big bang?

I ran to the doorway and yelled, “I’ve cleaned them out back here. But stay back. They’ve triggered a time bomb. I’ve got to find it and do a disconnect.”

Personally, I had a lot of respect for the Syrian Liberation Army members. Even in the midst of dying they still had been able to contact their main base — I assumed that was what the Arab at the short wave had been doing — and put a destruct device into operation. Dedicated men and women like that are always extremely dangerous. People willing to die for a cause must always be handled with extreme caution.

With my heart pounding, I began a frantic search for the source of the loud ticking, of the timing-detonator that was connected to explosives. I wondered what kind and how much.

The ticking led me to the detonator which had been placed behind the shortwave set. The timer-detonator was of the KLX type and had an hour’s maximum running time. I held up the timer and stared at the dial. Only four minutes were left. And there wasn’t any way I could reverse the timer knob of the KLX device. My only choice was to yank out the wires. But suppose the timer had a feedback circuit? If it did, I would never know it. The instant I pulled the wires, the back-feed spark would automatically detonate the explosive.

I jerked the four wires from the timing device and prayed. There was no explosion. My head remained on my neck. I still had my two arms and two legs.

The ticking stopped.

Perspiration pouring down my face, I quickly began to trace the wires that had been connected to the timer. They curled across the top of the packing case, ran over its edge and down to a two-foot square-box on the floor. Judging from the red markings on the box, there must have been fifty to sixty pounds of nitrocellulose in the small crate, more than enough explosive to blow up the building. In fact, more than enough to blow up half the block!

I jerked the four wires from the box and heaved a sigh of relief as Leah and half a dozen Shin Bet security men came into the room.

“Thank God you’re all right,” Leah breathed, resting her dark head against my chest. “You look like you’ve been through hell.”

“I’ll settle for purgatory,” I replied, then patted her hair and looked at the young, clean-cut Israeli with a square chin and thick eyebrows. From the way he acted, I assumed he was in command of the Shin Bet raiding party.

“There’s a crate of explosives over there,” I said, looking at him. “You’d better have your boys get it out of here.”

Nodding, the Shin Bet officer motioned to a couple of his men and they moved toward the box of nitrocellulose.

“You should have waited for us, Mr. Heines, or whatever your name is!” the Shin Bet officer said angrily. “If you hadn’t rushed the situation, we might have taken more of the scum alive. Mr. Ben-Zvi won’t be pleased when I make my report about your hasty activities.”

“In that case, Mr. Ben-Zvi will have to be sad,” I said calmly. “If I hadn’t charged the back room, you wouldn’t have captured any of the SLA alive. They had the entire place set to blow up with at least fifty pounds of plastic stuff. There was precious little time left when I disconnected the timer. Be sure to put that in your report to Mr. Ben-Zvi.”

A stunned look flashed over the face of the Shin Bet officer.

“I see,” he said stiffly and hooked his thumbs over his belt.

I shoved Wilhelmina back into her shoulder holster and took Leah by the arm. “Let’s go see what’s happening out front.”

Leah and I left the room, walked across the small open space and paused at the back of the long shop. The Shin Bet officer followed us but said nothing as we watched two of his men carrying out the corpse of the SLA woman on a stretcher. Two other Shin Bet agents — were holding the arms of the young clerk whom I had knocked out. He was still dazed, and his hands were handcuffed behind his back.

The Shin Bet officer in charge began to talk to Leah in Hebrew. He talked just as much with his hands, moving them all over the place, and I got the impression that if someone tied his hands, he wouldn’t have been able to recite his own name.

Finally, Leah turned to me and said, “Captain Stein wants us to ride back to Tel Aviv with him.”

“I heard him perfectly,” I growled, cutting her short and glaring at Stein. “Captain, our driver is waiting only two blocks away, and we’re going to return to Tel Aviv with him. Hamosad can contact us in the usual manner. Shalom.”

I turned to go. Stein placed a hand lightly on my arm. “But you two can’t return to your hotel looking as you do!” he protested.

I brushed aside Stein’s hand and took Leah by an elbow.

“We don’t intend to return to the Samuel looking like this. We’re first going to the safe house on Derech Hagevura to get rid of this makeup and change into regular clothes.”

I didn’t wait for Stein to reply. I steered Leah to the back door of the House of Medals. Once we were in the alley and past a dozen Shin Bet guards, I said to Leah, “You did a fine job back there. You acted like a professional.”

“But you didn’t think I would, did you?” Smoking a cigarette, she regarded me with cool eyes. She tilted her chin but there was no resentment in her words.

I felt I owed her the truth. “I was wrong about you and I’m sorry. You were terrific.”

I could tell by the flicker of surprise in her eyes and by the way she smiled that she hadn’t expected an apology from me.

“Perhaps you’ll be able to think of some nice way to make it up to me after we return to the hotel,” she said throatily.

“I already have,” I said.

Chapter Three

Both Leah and I felt much better after the layers of makeup had been removed from our faces and hands and after we had changed into more comfortable clothes. Our mood changed to intense curiosity when we returned to our suite in the Samuel and found David Hawk and Jacob Ben-Zvi waiting for us, Hawk sitting on a sofa, Ben-Zvi on a cushioned chair. As usual, Hawk was smoking a cigar that smelled like a by-product of an experiment in gas warfare.

The two men only nodded as Leah and I looked at them in surprise. Leah sat down next to Hawk on the sofa and I ambled over to the small bar, knowing why the two Intelligence chiefs had come to us: because Leah and I didn’t dare be seen going to Hamosad headquarters. The question was why were they here in the first place, especially Hawk. As the chief of the United States Special Espionage Agency, he wasn’t in the habit of going out into the field. Something damned important had to be in the wind.

“The operation of the House of Medals was a success,” Ben-Zvi said in a low voice. “The two of you are to be congratulated, especially you, Carter, since you originated the basic plan. Good work.”

“I try,” I said, glancing across the room at the Hamosad chief as I poured a generous amount of brandy into a glass. He was a short, stocky man with a square, blunt head topped with an enormous mass of gray-white hair. He had deep creases from his nose to his mouth, which turned heavily downward. His eyebrows were very busy, his hands bony and his skin burnt brown-tough from the hot Israeli sun. He was either in his late forties or early fifties.

“Nick is one of our best agents,” Hawk said, then turned his shaggy head to Leah. “And Mr. Ben-Zvi has been telling me of your resourcefulness and daring. You are a very brave young woman, my dear.”

Leah smiled and said, “Thank you, sir.” I dropped several ice cubes into the glass, put down the tongs and leaned over on the bar, watching Hawk. Several years past sixty, he was a solid chunk of a man who, in spite of his advanced years, still had the strength of a bull. If he was ten or fifteen years younger, I wouldn’t want to tangle with him.

Hawk gave me one of his hard looks. “If you keep wondering why I’m here in Israel, you’re going to throw your brain out of gear,” he growled. “I’m here to make sure our intelligence about the SLA dovetails with what the Hamosad has learned about the terrorist organization. The situation is worse than we thought previously.”

For a moment I stared at Hawk, then took a swallow of brandy. Leah and Ben-Zvi remained silent. I could detect that they had that sharp sense of here and now — a keen awareness of the moment, a feeling of excitement and at the same time of dread.

“So what’s the new development?” I looked directly at Hawk and put the glass on the bar.

“It’s the overall seriousness of the SLA plot that poses such an extreme threat,” Hawk said gruffly. He leaned forward and tapped his cigar into an ashtray on the low cocktail table. “We still don’t know how the bombs are to be planted on board the supertanker, or the names of the terrorists assigned to do the job. We don’t even know the name of the tanker.” He chomped down on his cigar and spoke around it. “There are more than a hundred liquified natural gas installations in the world and eighty of them are in the U.S. Carter, you’ve been in this business long enough to know the other factors involved.”

“Yeah, the SLA could have deliberately used disinformation,” I said. “They could be planning to blow up a supertanker in some harbor other than in New York City.” I picked up the brandy and swirled the ice cubes in the glass. “For that matter, the whole deal might be a cover-up for some other plot. As I see it, we’re going to have to capture the top leaders to get the real truth.”

Leah spoke up. “Let’s hope the SLA member we captured will give us a solid lead. We must find Mohammed Karameh.”

“The terrorist is being questioned at this very moment,” Ben-Zvi said grimly. “We have our ways of getting the truth from even the most stubborn of fanatics.” Folding his hands, he squeezed one set of knuckles, then the other. “But frankly, I doubt if he can tell us anything of vital importance. He’s only a lower echelon member.”

“Surely he must have some important information!” Leah protested, brushing a strand of raven hair from her forehead. “Otherwise we’re right back where we started.”

“Not quite,” Hawk countered, only he looked at me as he spoke. He continued to hold me with his stare as he said, “For the last four months, AXE has had two Syrian nationals working for us in Damascus. A brother and sister team, who are members of the SLA, but who are also supplying us with important information — for a heavy price, of course. In fact, it was Ahmed Kamel and his sister, Miriam, who tipped us off to the supertanker plot.”

Leah looked surprised, and I figured her thoughts were similar to mine. If the two Syrians knew so damn much, why didn’t they know the location of SLA headquarters? I was angry as hell but kept a straight face out of respect for Hawk and because I knew a display of anger wouldn’t have helped. The Second Coming of Christ wouldn’t have fazed Hawk. I had a more diplomatic way of letting him know I didn’t like being used.

“Sir, if Ahmed Kamel and his sister knew about the LNG scheme, why didn’t we obtain the location of SLA headquarters from them?”

“We didn’t, because the Kamels didn’t know the location of the main SLA base,” Hawk said, taking the stub of the cigar from his mouth. “They weren’t trusted members of the SLA — trusted to the extent that they knew the SLA’s main base — until a week ago.”

I finished my drink, put down the empty glass and looked at Hawk.

“You’re saying that you and Mr. Ben-Zvi now know the location?”

Hawk nodded. “The Kamels managed to get word to us through a Control Officer in Damascus.”

I glared at Jacob Ben-Zvi. “Yet you still let me and Miss Weizmann risk our necks in the House of Medals! Thanks a lot!”

Ben-Zvi’s face contorted into a puzzled half-smile. “There wasn’t any valid reason to call off the strike against the House of Medals,” he said, gesticulating with one bony hand. “The place was scheduled to be raided. Your plan was the best, N3.”

Hawk reached into the inside pocket of his rumpled coat and took out another cigar. “Actually we didn’t get the message from the Kamels until yesterday afternoon.” There was a fatherly tone to his voice. “Their report was on a need-to-know basis. You understand that.”

I grinned crookedly at Hawk. “And now that I do know, I suppose the next thing you’re going to tell me is that I’ve got to skip over to Damascus and check out Ahmed and Miriam Kamel?”

“That’s only half of your assignment,” Hawk said matter-of-factly, removing the wrapper from the cigar. “The second half is more complicated. Ahmed Kamel will lead you to within sight of Karameh’s headquarters. You’ll get the exact coordinates of the base’s location, then get the hell out of Syria and back to Tel Aviv.”

“We Israelis will do the rest,” Ben-Zvi said passionately. “We’ll bomb the base off the face of the earth.”

I looked at Hawk. “Sir, I was under the impression that the Kamels had given you and the Hamosad the location of the SLA base! Besides, they’re both double agents. How do you know they’re telling the truth; unless, of course, their love of money is greater than their revolutionary fervor.”

“It is,” Hawk said and shoved the cigar into his mouth. “It was they who tipped us off to the House of Medals. Yeah, there’s a possibility that the whole thing’s a setup, but I don’t think so. We’ll have to chance it.”

“What about SLA headquarters?” I asked.

“Karameh’s main base is on the As-Suwayda hills of southeastern Syria,” Hawk explained. “You have to go in because the Kamels don’t know a thing about cartography. They can’t pinpoint the exact location.”

Ben-Zvi added, “You won’t slip into Syria until after we’ve questioned the terrorist that you and Leah captured. He might have some information that will have a bearing on your mission.”

“Which means I’ll leave sometime tomorrow morning,” I said.

“Before dawn,” Ben-Zvi said flatly.

My eyes jumped to Hawk, then to Ben-Zvi. I didn’t like the deal. I never have trusted double agents. And suicide has never appealed to me.

Chapter Four

Leah and I had planned to go out that night and celebrate along Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff, a street of crowded sidewalk cafes and juice bars. Hawk and Ben-Zvi’s visit changed all that. In the first place, neither Leah nor I were in the mood. In the second place, at midnight the Israelis were going to fly me to Tiberias, an ancient city on the western shores of the Sea of Galilee.

Ben-Zvi had given me a brief rundown on how I would slip into Syria. Two agents, one an Israeli, the other a Syrian, would take me across the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights. After that I’d be on my own.

We had dinner sent up to our suite and discussed the situation as we ate. Not one to minimize the danger, Leah quietly pointed out that if I were captured by the Syrian authorities, I would be given a quick trial and hanged as a spy.

I paused in cutting my T-bone and gave Leah a reproving look.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said. “Naturally the Syrians would stretch my neck. They love you Israelis like the Kremlin loves the Vatican. I’m not concerned as much about the Syrian police as I am about Ahmed and Miriam Kamel. I’m going into Syria like a doomed sinner and my only salvation is a couple of Arabs I trust like the plague.”

Leah dabbed at her mouth with a napkin, then said, “So far the Kamels have proved trustworthy. After all, they did tip Hamosad to the SLA cell operating out of the House of Medals.”

“Which doesn’t prove a damn thing,” I said. “The Syrian Liberation Army is ten times more kill-crazy than the PLO and Black September combined. Karameh and his top boys wouldn’t think twice about sacrificing their own people to accomplish some particular end.”

“You mean if the Kamels are lying to AXE and to Hamosad?” Leah gave me a puzzled look. “But what could the SLA hope to accomplish?”

I sighed, picked up a glass of wine and stared thoughtfully into the red depths. “Suppose the SLA wanted you Israelis to bomb a fake base? To do that, the Kamels would have to lead me to within sight of a phony camp. That’s one possibility.”

“But not very probable in my opinion.”

Finishing the wine, I placed the glass on the table and pushed back my chair. “Another possibility is that Syria might want to start a war with Israel, using the Israeli bombing of the fake base as an excuse. But I don’t think so. The Syrians aren’t quite that stupid. Even if they were, the Russians wouldn’t let them.”

Leah smiled at me, got up from the table and we went over to the couch and sat down. It was only 7:30 and there was still plenty of time to say our intimate goodbyes.

She leaned back on the couch, her eyes flashing more provocatively than usual. “I thought you were going to make something up to me,” she said softly. “Or have you forgotten?” Before I could answer, her arms instinctively reached around my neck, her heart pounding with such ferocity that I could see her skin quivering above it.

As we kissed, Leah felt my excitement grow and whispered, “The bedroom will be more comfortable.”

Leah slipped out of her clothes as we walked across the room. She stretched across the bed languidly and watched me undress, her eyes half-closed. Before I could finish, her hands folded around the nape of my neck, and she pulled me down on top of herself.

The love-act with Leah was an ever-increasing sensation of endless pleasure. Her breasts, her slim waist, her well-formed thighs, the ecstatic expression her beautiful face all combined into a succession of thrills, making me want to caress them all at the same time. Successively, I managed to do them all justice, sending her into heights of rapture. She began shrieking and gasping, and then she began to moan. Her arms clasped me tight with iron determination; her powerful thighs closed around me, and I felt her tightening in that lubricous haven to which I constantly strove with all my might. I felt an irresistible impulse to propel myself forward, and covered her with a last, ultimate advance that left no particle of air between us.

Odd, I thought. Tonight I was in heaven.

Tomorrow I’d be in Syria — in hell...

Chapter Five

Although Damascus is said to be the oldest continually inhabited city in the world, it does not look old. Modern apartment and office buildings rise on either side of broad landscaped boulevards while the residential area is laid out with small green squares and broad lawns. Flower gardens surround attractive villas.

This was not my first visit to Damascus, so I knew that the most beautiful view of the city was at sunset from the Salihiya Hill, a ten minute drive from the center of the city. Below the hill lies Damascus, the Barada River fanning out into seven branches, traced by poplar trees which line their banks and by the nearby green of the gardens. Damascus’ shining white houses and its many domed mosques are encircled by green parks and fruit groves which end abruptly at the desert’s edge. Tall, slim minarets push skyward and, as the sun drops below the horizon and the sky reddens, muezzins appear everywhere on the balconies of these minarets, summoning people to evening prayer with the unforgettable call, “Allah el Akbar” — “God is great, God is great, there is no God but God.”

But I wasn’t the least bit interested in the sights of Damascus. I was too concerned with making my way to the shop of Ahmed Kamel. I glanced at my wristwatch: 3:35 in the afternoon. I had made good time and hadn’t encountered any difficulty.

Walking in the old section of the city, I thought of how everything had gone as planned. The two Hamosad agents and I had crossed the Sea of Galilee; then they led me across the highly dangerous Golan Heights, that strip of land that is occupied by the Israelis. Once across the Heights, I had been met by another agent, a Syrian Jew who drove me in his vegetable truck to the little village of El Ruad, an uncomfortable trip, since I had been in the back surrounded on all sides by crates of tomatoes and grapes. Much later in the day, when the roads were thick with traffic, another Syrian Jew had driven me the rest of the distance to Damascus, some seventy miles. I had left the back of the truck while the vehicle was parked not far from the enormous Kaddha market.

Only once had I been stopped by one of the Fazets, a member of the regular police. Seeing that I was not Syrian, the man, speaking broken English, had asked to see my identification.

“Certainly,” I had replied in Arabic, immediately producing my forged, English passport in the name Joseph Allen Galloway. Along with the passport I handed him the forged Syrian visa, all properly stamped, all so authentic looking I almost believed it myself. Just in case, I had forged ticket stubs to prove that I had entered Syria the morning of that very day, arriving on the Josi-Dan Express, a train that runs from Amman, Jordan, to Damascus, Syria.

Pleased that I could speak Arabic, the man smiled. “You are in Syria as a tourist, Mr. Galloway?” he had asked politely, handing me my passport and visa. “Or on business.”

“On business,” I had replied promptly. “I’m an importer in London. I’ve come to Syria to buy rugs and brass and copper items.” I had then added another big lie. “This is my tenth trip to your marvelous country.”

My only real concern was that the policeman might search me, in which case he would find Wilhelmina in her shoulder holster and Hugo nestled against my right arm.

The policeman had smiled, had wished me a pleasant stay in Syria and had gone on his way. I had continued on mine, thinking that if worse came to worst, that if the Syrian secret police grabbed me by some fluke, I’d “confess” to being a member of the Irish Republican Army, and say that I had come to Syria to learn methods of terrorism from the SLA. It was no secret in the world intelligence community that the IRA had links to all the larger Arab terrorists groups, Al Fatah, Black September, the P.L.O. and the SLA. Whether or not the Syrians would have believed me was another matter. If they did, they would release me. Not that the Syrians loved the IRA. But Damascus hated Israel and the SLA was doing all in its power to bring down the Israelis. Conclusion: any friends of the SLA were looked upon with favor.

I was now approaching the Hamidiyyah Bazaar, the famous “Long Market” which extends for almost a mile. All around me were people from various nations — mostly tourists, although many were Arabs. Motor vehicles threaded their way through the dense crowds, their horns perpetually sounding but gaining little attention from the bargaining masses. Other than the main road, the entire bazaar was a veritable warren of crisscrossing lanes and winding streets. White-bearded, turbaned men with faces like patriarchs of the Bible sat cross-legged in front of their shops, selling calico and stripped gallibiyea cloth from bolts neatly stacked on shelves behind them. Other shops sold handmade artifacts such as inlaid chests, engraved copper wares, ceramics and embroideries.

I forced my way through the throng, now and then asking directions, until I finally saw the long sign: FINE RUGS. ENGRAVED BRASS, BRONZE & COPPER. AHMED KAMEL, PROPRIETOR.

Constantly on the lookout for the darting hand of a pickpocket, I pushed and shoved until I reached the entrance of the shop, which was larger than most, indicating that Ahmed Kamel and his sister did a thriving business.

Inside there were numerous customers milling around and four clerks, two men and two women. Ahmed Kamel was not among them. I was positive because, before I left Tel Aviv, the Hamosad had shown me photographs of Kamel and his sister. But one of the women clerks was Miriam Kamel, who, at the moment, was waiting on a tourist couple. In spite of the fact that I might be walking into a cleverly set trap, I couldn’t help but have erotic thoughts about her, all generated by the tight, black dress which showed her figure to its best advantage.

Following Hawk’s instructions, I walked up to the counter and handed her my forged Joseph Allen Galloway, Importer business card. She looked at it, for a moment then her dark eyes swept over me, appraising me calmly.

“I should like to see Mr. Kamel,” I said in Arabic, trying not to stare at her breasts.

“One moment, Mr. Galloway.” Giving me a quick smile, she went across the wide room and whispered something to one of the male clerks. Nodding, the hawk-faced man glanced at me, and I wondered if the woman had instructed him to call the police. If she had, she’d be the first to get one of Wilhelmina’s 9 mm hollow points. But the clerk only turned to a customer while Miriam walked back to me.

“Follow me, Mr. Galloway,” she said with a slight smile. She turned and moved toward a curtained archway at one end of the room. Undressing her with my eyes, I followed, well aware that if I had walked into a trap, I was doing it with all of the helplessness of a lamb being led to slaughter.

Beyond the archway was a short hall and three closed doors, one on either side and one at the end of the passage. Miriam chose the door to our right, and after we entered, I saw that we were in a sitting room. There were several fancy cushioned chairs, and an intricately carved teak table was centered between two blue sofas.

I sat down in the center of one sofa. Miriam positioned herself opposite me and crossed her long legs, her dark eyes measuring me intently. I played it cool, deliberately refraining from mentioning her brother. For a moment there was silence, except for the faint sound coming from the air-conditioning duct in one corner of the room.

“We can talk freely here; no one will hear us,” she said at length. “I told the chief clerk that you were an importer from England and to see that no one disturbed us. Unfortunately, my brother is not available. He’s in the hospital with a case of stomach ulcers.”

I stared at her, letting my intuition have a free hand and watching how she was moving her left foot in little circles.

“Does your brother’s illness change any part of the plan?” I asked.

“I can lead you to the SLA base in the As-Suwayda hills. Ahmed’s being in the hospital does not pose any problems in regard to your mission. Would you like a drink?” she added, her voice sultry.

She didn’t wait for me to answer. A teasing smile playing around the edges of her mouth, she got up, went across the room and stopped by a small table. She pressed a button in the wall, and slowly the bar moved forward from its hidden compartment. Seeing my surprise, she explained that she and her brother had many Western friends who drank and that many of their Moslem friends did, in spite of the Moslem prohibition against alcohol.

I looked at the bar. “Well stocked, I see.” I deliberately moved closer to her, inhaling her faint perfume and eyeing the thrust of her nipples against the thin material of her dress. I pulled out a pack of Syrian Triangle cigarettes as she put her lush behind on a stool, indicated the other side of the bar with a hand and gave a tiny laugh, her upper lip rising to show the tip of small, evenly shaped teeth.

“Help yourself,” she said. She looked at me as I moved behind the bar. “Nothing for me. I don’t drink, not only because of my religion but because I consider drinking a weakness.”

I lit the Triangle, vaguely wishing I could have had my own monogrammed brand which I had imported from Turkey.

“I’ll buy that,” I said, placing a fifth of Scotch on the bar. “Booze is almost as bad as smoking. Cigarettes killed my grandfather. He died at ninety-six.” I poured a generous slug of scotch into a glass, then reached for the ice cubes in the West German-made ice maker underneath the bar.

“You don’t seem to be concerned about getting to within sight of Karameh’s main base,” she said. “Or could it be that you’re only being polite and really think that I can’t do the job?”

“You said you could do it,” I shrugged. “I assume that you can. I am interested in how dangerous the journey will be and what method of travel we’ll use. I certainly don ’ t look like an Arab and I can’t see, myself bouncing up and down on a camel.”

Miriam laughed. “Transportation is not a problem. You see, I have an American van. I believe the make is a Dodge. It was once used as a laundry delivery van. It will be very comfortable.”

“A van,” I repeated. “What some Americans refer to as a sin-bin, and yet you say we’ll be comfortable in it!”

Miriam looked at me in astonishment.

“I suppose I didn’t make myself clear,” I said, laughing. “Actually I meant the heat. We’ll roast in a van.”

“No, we won’t,” Miriam said. “My brother had the van completely renovated. It’s air-conditioned, and the rear has been turned into living quarters — small but comfortable. The van is also equipped with heavy duty springs and Land Rover tires for rough country travel.”

Tired from all the walking I had done, I took my drink, went back to the sofa and said, “How far is it to the As-Suwayda hills, and what kind of country will we be going through?”

Before leaving Israel, I had studied a detailed topography map of Syria and had discussed the entire situation with Hamosad experts; therefore, I knew that the distance from Damascus to the As-Suwayda region was roughly 50 miles. I also knew that, while there was a road part of the way, the last several miles would have to be traveled over very rough terrain. But I wanted to hear Miriam tell me her version. Her information was similar, although she wasn’t sure about the distance.

“Much of the way is a well-travelled trade route,” she said. “The rest will be over rough country, rocky but not impassable. As for the sand dunes, the true desert is farther to the east.” She got up from the sofa, walked across the short space and sat down beside me. “There could be some problems though.”

I frowned. “The Syrian Desert Patrol? It was my understanding that the Syrian government more-or-less ignores the SLA!”

“The government soldiers won’t bother us,” she explained, sliding closer to me. “They know the van. Ahmed is an amateur archeologist and he and I often go out into the desert to poke around old Roman ruins.” I saw her face tighten with solemnity. “The trouble might come from bandits, either Syrian or Jordanian bandits. It is difficult for either our own government or the Jordan government to control the Bedouin scavengers. We’ll have automatic weapons, but we’ll have to be constantly on guard, especially after we leave the trade route. We can leave tomorrow morning, unless there is some reason why we shouldn’t.”

“What kind of automatic weapons?”

She looked at me in annoyance, as if I had asked a dirty question.

“An AK-47 assault rifle and a Skorpion machine pistol,” she said. “And before I forget — Ahmed obtained the other things you will need for ascertaining the exact location of the camp, although the sextant and the celestial computer were not easy to get.” Her voice softened. “Like I said, we can leave tomorrow morning. Naturally, you will spend the night here.”

I began to get ideas that had nothing to do with finding the Syrian Liberation Army base; yet I had to be sure that I had not misread the subtle invitation in her low voice, or that she wasn’t just a teaser.

“Yes, with your brother in the hospital, his room is empty,” I said with an innocent smile.

“Ahmed would not like a stranger sleeping in his bed, any more than I would want you to sleep on one of these uncomfortable sofas.” Her voice was low and tinged with faint mockery.

Watching her smiling at me, her crimson lips curled slightly in amusement, I decided that it was time to make my move. I began to run my hand along her forearm, over skin that was soft, almost like silk. She sighed deeply and began to breathe faster as I moved my hand to her back, my fingers pulling the zipper tab downward. Then my fingers found smooth, cool flesh, while my other hand began pulling the black dress over one shoulder. My lips closed over hers and opened again, and she reached inside my mouth with her tongue. She helped me pull the dress over her other shoulder, and then wriggled out of it completely.

Laying back on the couch, she laced her arms around my head and neck, drawing me close as I moved my face down between her full heaving breasts. I traced the delicate curve of one with my tongue while her fingers fumbled with my belt, unfastening it. She writhed against me and moaned softly, as I slipped out of my pants and shorts. Her eyes were closed as though in some kind of trance, her lovely breasts indicating her increasing passion, rising and falling with greater rapidity, the nipples as hard as stone.

I began to stroke and kiss her eyelids and fine-boned nose, moving my lips, tongue and fingers slowly over her body — down over the bared neck, the heaving breasts, and smooth belly. With deft fingers I probed the wedge-shaped area of curly hair at the meeting of the inside of her thighs.

I carefully edged myself over until I was on top and my legs firmly entrenched between her warm thighs... Both my hands enfolded her body and I lowered my head to hers until my lips met her trembling mouth and she accepted my anxious, darting tongue. Then and only then did I arch forward, pushing the lance full length into her begging orifice. She gave a tiny cry of mingled pain and delight; her arms tightened around my neck, her legs over mine, and carefully I began those vital in-and-out motions. We were both starving for that supreme moment, that final, explosive sensation, and rapidly the pace became more furious.

It was — now! The rapture of our two bodies had merged fire and flame together, so that when it was time for one it was time for the other... pure passion overflowed and swallowed us both in a strange but beautiful exhaustion.

Miriam stared into my eyes and whispered, “We’re going to enjoy the trip to the As-Suwayda hills.”

Sure we would, I thought. But what about the return trip?

Chapter Six

Dressed in khaki pants, matching shirt, and wearing walker boots, Miriam acted as though we were going on a long camping trip instead of a dangerous mission. As the hours passed and Damascus was far behind us, I tried to decide whether she was very brave, or an important cog in some machine of deceit and treachery. I was positive about one thing: She wasn’t a fool. And she certainly wasn’t an idealist, unless she was lying to me, but rather a very sensuous woman whose prime motivation was simple greed.

The van was everything she had said it was. In place of sliding bus-type doors on each side, there were regular doors that could be locked on the inside. In the rear were two bunks, one on either side, a built-in stove and a refrigerator, both powered by propane gas. A small metal table was bolted to the center of the floor and there was ample storage space in the wall lockers.

The food locker and refrigerator were well-stocked. I calculated that there was more than enough food for a five or six day journey, which meant that Miriam had packed enough for a return trip. Still, I was suspicious of her. In this business, “trust” is a word used only by fools.

Before we left, I had inspected the compartment where the firearms were stored, checking the Russian AK-47 assault rifle and the Czech machine pistol, relieved that there was plenty of ammo for both weapons, as well as for the two Spanish 9-millimeter automatics and the U.S. Gwinn Bushmaster. I felt like singing God Bless America when I saw the campsite intruder detection system, all neatly packed in its box.

During the night Miriam had told me that she and her brother had joined the Syrian Liberation Army for two reasons: because they hated Jews and “World Zionism,” and because they were convinced that the “dispossessed” Palestinians deserved a state of their own. I had then asked her why, in spite of such honest beliefs, she and her brother were working not only for the U.S. Special Espionage Agency but for Hamosad, the worldwide intelligence apparatus of the very nation they hoped to destroy!

Miriam’s answer had been prompt and practical — money. “One can’t buy the finer things of life with political idealism,” she had said, adding that, as she and Ahmed had analyzed the situation, all the Arab terrorist organizations were unrealistic, violent dreamers. Israel would never fall; the United States could not afford to let that happen. There was also Arab disunity, centuries’ old hatreds which made it impossible for the Arab nations to work together.

Now, as I drove the van over the concrete road, I decided that maybe Miriam was telling the truth, and maybe she wasn’t. I’d have to wait and see.

There isn’t anything interesting about the Syrian countryside, the dominant feature being the Syrian Desert, an arid region that stretches between two fertile regions: the Mediterranean coastal lands on the west and the valley of the Euphrates River on the east. This desert comprises all of central and most of southeast Syria.

The Hamad, the south-central area of the desert, reaches almost to the foot of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains in places. To the east of the Hauran district, in the southwest, lies the Jebel ed Druz, a plateau reaching-its highest point in a peak of the same name at 5,900 feet.

The As-Suwayda hill region lies in southeast Syria, an inhospitable region of wind-swept rock and stony slopes dotted with buckthorn and tamarisk. There is little natural forest, only scrub Aleppo pine. Further up the slopes of the As-Suwayda grows steppe-like vegetation, and there is some grass around wadis.

We took turns driving, neither of us trying to break any speed records. Not only was the road a winding ribbon filled with camels, donkeys and ox-pulled carts, along with a sprinkling of cars and trucks of every make, but the hot concrete demanded that we go slow to protect the rubber of the Land Rover tires.

When we came to empty stretches of road, heat devils danced ahead of us, but the interior of the van was cool and comfortable, the air conditioner working at maximum. The nights would be far different. Once the sun had dropped below the horizon, the sand and rocks would quickly lose their heat and within a few hours the temperature would fall to the mid-fifties and we’d have to use the Primus Model infra-red heater to bum the chill from the air.

We reached the end of the road at 3:30 in the afternoon. One moment there was hot concrete, then only hard topsoil baked hard by the sun, and scattered limestone. Some of the rocks were the size of small boulders, but most of it was pebbly.

We bounced along until sunset, then parked and set up camp for the night. In case anyone in the distance was watching through binoculars, I waited until dark before setting up the intruder detection system.

Battery-powered, the I.D.S. was actually a very simple system consisting of a central station, about the size of a box of kitchen matches, and a spool of wire; it was geared to be set up in a two perimeter defense. All I did was stretch the ultra-thin wire around the camp, one end of the wire connected to the receiving station; should the wire be broken, a red light would flash and a beeper alert us.

I established two circular perimeters around the van — the first slightly over ninety feet from the van, the second at half that distance. If the wire of the second perimeter was broken, both red lights would flash and the tone would change to a pulsing beep. Luckily there were no intruders that night; Miriam and I were both exhausted from the day’s driving.

The strain the next day was even worse because we had to find our own route and pick our way around large boulders and over slab rock. Yet we made good time; when daylight began to fade, Miriam said we were still on schedule.

Once more we parked the van under a ceiling of wide-open sky, with nothing around us but the uneven flow of worthless land. After I set up the two perimeter defense system, Miriam closed the fiber-board partition separating the driver’s section from the rest of the van, while I covered the glass of the rear door with thick paper, hoping to make the van invisible from any lurking enemy.

We had finished our supper of canned beef, lima beans, mint tea and barasizk, a cake made with pistachio and sesame seeds, and were disposing of the paper plates when the I.D.S. alarm sounded. Along with the beeping, one red light began to flash on and off.

Miriam’s eyes widened. “It could be some small animal?” she whispered, watching me open the arms locker and take out the Gwinn Bushmaster and the AK-47 assault rifle.

“Give me the AK-47,” she said, a nervous edge to her voice. I handed her the weapon, then turned off the Primus lantern and pushed back the partition. Together Miriam and I looked through the glass of the wide windshield and of the two doors. The night was as black as the inside of a barrel of tar, the stars, in the clear air, shining like blue diamonds.

I unlocked the door on the right-hand side cautiously. “Once we’re outside,” I told Miriam, “count ten before you fire. That will give me some time to get around to the other side.” She nodded quickly, but I sensed her apprehension. “Rake the west side in a semicircle. Then get back inside and lock the doors. I’ll give you three short knocks before I come back in.”

Easing the door open, the two of us stepped outside into the night. We heard nothing and saw only blackness, but sensed that we were not alone, that someone or something was less than one hundred feet away.

As Miriam pulled back the cocking lever of her AK-47, I crept quickly around to the other side of the van and, for an instant, let my eyes poke into the darkness. I couldn’t be certain, but thought that I could detect shadowy forms moving very slowly toward the van.

I’ll know in a moment, I told myself and opened fire with the Bushmaster at the same time that Miriam cut loose with the AK-47. The racket of both weapons made it seem as if the world had suddenly exploded.

The Bushmaster alone creates a deafening roar, as if someone was tossing scores of miniature hand grenades. Originally conceived as a U.S. Air Force survival pistol, the odd-looking autoloader could be fired on either full or semi-automatic, spitting out .223 caliber slugs from an M16 magazine inserted behind the pistol grip.

In a low crouch and keeping constantly on the move, I fired the Bushmaster on semi-automatic, spacing out the shots and swinging the weapon from north to south, from left to right, my reward being three or four screams of pain. I then lowered the weapon to rake the actual ground and swung it from the right to the left. In less than a minute, the 34-round magazine was empty.

By now my eyes had accustomed themselves to the darkness and I could make out about a dozen on the ground. But three of the attackers were on their feet and very much alive. Thinking I was out of ammunition, they started running toward me, one screaming, “INFIDEL! WE KILL YOU!”; another snapping off a shot with a pistol. But I had seen the man’s movement and had ducked to one side, at the same time jerking Wilhelmina from her shoulder holster and thumbing off the safety. The enemy bullet zinged off the van, and I put one of Wilhelmina’s Luger projectiles into the man who had fired. The 9mm Parabellum bullet struck the man in the chest, knocked him backward, and he went down at the same instant that I triggered off two more rounds. One 9mm smashed into an Arab’s stomach, doubling him over; he quit trying to raise his rifle when another slug bored into his forehead. The third man jerked to his left and fired his carbine as I ducked to the right and twice more pulled Wilhelmina’s trigger. The first slug struck him in the chest, the second in the stomach, the double impact of the HP bullets knocking him off his feet. Down he went, his burnoose flying.

I ran around the end of the van and came up on its other side in time to see another invader creeping toward the side door. Wilhelmina had exhausted her ammunition and I didn’t have time to shove in another clip and cock the old girl. I twisted my right arm, freed Hugo from his chamois case and let him slip handle-first into my hand. The Arab, spinning toward me, did his best to blow me up with a rifle that appeared to be an old-fashioned bolt-action weapon.

I ruined his chances by tossing Hugo at him as I ducked to one side to avoid his bullet. The pencil-thin stiletto speared him in the throat, the surgical steel slicing through his flesh; the man’s legs folded and he went down.

Quickly I shoved another clip-full of 9mm hollow points into Wilhelmina, cocked her and looked through the glass of the door, but I didn’t see Miriam. Either she was down on the floor or in the rear of the van. I rapped three times and instantly her head popped up from beside the bucket seat next to the driver’s. She unlocked the door and I stepped inside and relocked it.

“They’re all dead, all of them?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “I’m going back out and make sure. Keep watch but stay in.”

I went into the rear of the van, took the Czech Skorpion Machine Pistol and two magazines from the gun locker, shoved the two long clips into my waistband, and again went outside. Cautiously I checked around the front of the van; I could have gone out and inspected the perimeters but I wasn’t an idiot.

I picked up the empty Bushmaster, crept around the rear of the van and went back to retrieve Hugo. Sighing in disgust because I knew I was going to have another sleepless night, I reached down, pulled Hugo from the dead man’s throat and wiped both sides of the blade on the corpse’s burnoose.

I rapped three times on the door and Miriam let me in. “We shouldn’t spend the rest of the night here,” she said right off, staring at me.

“We’re not going to!” I went to the rear of the van, carefully placed Hugo in the tiny sink and returned the Bushmaster and the Skorpion machine pistol to the gun locker; I then hurried back to the driver’s seat and sat down.

“I counted sixteen bodies out there,” I said, turning on the headlights and starting the motor. “What will happen when the Syrian Desert Patrol discovers them?”

Still clutching her AK-47, Miriam sat down in the seat next to me as I started to move the van forward. “The border police won’t even try to find out who killed the bandit trash,” she said. “What we have in Syria is similar to what used to happen in your nation’s South when anti-Negro organizations would lynch black men and women.”

From the corner of my eye, I could see her peering ahead at the twin yellow beams of the headlights. We might as well have been on the Moon. “How far are you going to drive?” she asked.

“Five miles,” I replied. “After we stop, I’ll set up a new defense with the I.D.S., even though I feel that we’re safe enough. The few bandits holding the camels would have to be crazy to attack us.”

Several hours later, Miriam and I both felt more relaxed, especially after I had erected three perimeters of hair-thin wire, the farthest 180 feet from the van, the middle one 120 feet, the closest 60 feet. I set the beeper to maximum, cleaned Hugo and reloaded the Bushmaster and the machine pistol. A short while later, I placed the I.D.S. station close to my ear as I settled down in the bunk on my side of the van.

We pulled out the next morning when the sun was already high above the horizon. The van bounced over small rocks and rough, broken ground, the heavy-duty springs creaking in protest whenever the wheels rolled over slabs of broken skag and lava-rock. We were now close to the As-Suwayda Hills.

The plan for approaching Mohammed Bashir Karameh’s main SLA camp was basically practical. According to Miriam there would be guards posted at strategic positions, all around the camp for several miles. These guards would be at the highest points available in order to detect anyone who might approach at a distance. Miriam explained that we would overcome this problem by driving through the Wadi el Mujib. At this time of the year, the deep ravine would be bone dry. All we would have to do is drove down the wadi, park the van and climb up one side, up a few hundred feet of slanting limestone. Once at the top, we would keep behind large boulders and from there see the camp, situated on a high plain, through powerful binoculars. We could even photograph it with a camera equipped with telescopic lens which Miriam had thoughtfully provided. On the surface, the whole deal was a snap. I’d draw a crude map, make the proper coordinates, take the longitude and latitude and gear the whole procedure for photomosaics and orthophotos. That is, for the aerial photography that would follow, conducted by a U.S. satellite which, two hundred miles overhead, would be diverted for that purpose.

Miriam and I would then return to Damascus where I would give the information to a Hamosad agent and later take the Josi-Dan Express to Amman, Jordan. From Jordan I would return to Tel Aviv. All very simple. At least in theory.

This third day was pure hell. The almost constant bouncing up-and-down of the van loosened a connection in the air-conditioning system, and soon Miriam and I were sweltering in the heat, our clothes soaked with perspiration. I removed my shirt and wrapped a towel around my neck; Miriam removed her shirt, and slacks, so that she was wearing only thin panties and a bra.

Toward noon it became obvious that we were off schedule and would not reach the wadi until the next day. I toyed with the idea of driving at night, but quickly decided that the risk would be too great. The glow of the headlights would be seen for miles and there was the chance that, in the dark, I would run the van over too large a rock and break a spring. The van was too precious; without it, Miriam and I would die.

“How about landmarks?” I asked Miriam. “If you have any doubts that we’re off the route, now is the time to say so. You must be absolutely certain.” I gave her a quick glance. “Well, are you sure or aren’t you?”

“I’ve been to the SLA base four different times,” Miriam said confidently. “I know where we are and we are on the right route.” She paused to light a cigarette. “We passed one of the landmarks this morning. The Roman ruins were the remains of the Temple of Jupiter. The six columns are all that is left. As you know, Syria was once a province of Rome. We’ll see more Roman ruins as we get closer to the wadi.”

“Yesterday you mentioned something about a castle built by the Crusaders,” I said. “How far away is it?”

“A long way yet,” Miriam laughed. “The Tower of Lions is on the rise where Karameh has his camp. We’ll be able to see it tomorrow.”

I didn’t press the issue. Not only did I not know the route to the SLA camp, but I wasn’t even sure of our position in Syria, and I wasn’t going to waste time by using the sextant to “shoot the sun” every half hour. The only certainty in my mind was that we were in an area totally unsuitable for human habitation. How the ancient Romans and later, the Crusaders, had managed to build anything in this hellhole had to be the eleventh wonder of the world.

As far as I could see, there was only desolation, tumbled rocks and the grotesque mounds that were the remains of ancient mountains which, over the many thousands of years, had been worn down by the wind carrying sharp grains of sand. There was scattered scrub vegetation, but in general the terrain was deeply scored and pitted by centuries of violent dust storms. Amidst this depressing landscape were stretches of gravel mixed with fine sand or chipped rock, the latter of which I avoided as much as possible, to save the tires of the battered van; and always there was the bright glare of the sun whose rays reflected savagely from the rocks. The Kalichrome sunglasses we wore helped a little, but still our eyes ached and watered.

Exhausted, sweat running down our bodies in rivulets, Miriam and I finally parked for the night in the center of a rectangular stretch of gravel covering bare granite. Desperately we wanted a shower, but we couldn’t afford the water. To console ourselves we looked forward to the darkness when the heat would drift off into space and the night would quickly become chilled.

Stretching out the “alarm” wire from its big spool, it came to me that Mohammed Bashir Karameh had chosen his campsite well. God Almighty couldn’t have given the terrorist a more inaccessible position — except from the air! Karameh had a lot of his supplies flown in by helicopter, practically all of the choppers coming in from around Damascus, proof enough that the Syrian government was closing its eyes to the tactics and terrorism of the SLA. Water was not a problem.

“He has deep wells up there,” Miriam had said days earlier. “It was a good supply of water that was the deciding factor in al-Huriya’s choosing the place for his camp.”

“Al-Huriya?” I had said at the time.

“Yes, that is what his followers call Mohammed Bashir Karameh — ‘The Hawk.’ ”

I finished looping the wire around the van, thinking that I and the Israeli Air Force would shortly pluck the Hawk of all his feathers and turn him into a naked sparrow...

Chapter Seven

At exactly 10:38 the next morning, we saw the vital landmark: the two Roman milestones sticking up crookedly from one of the slopes to the right, the two tall stones marked with ancient Latin words.

I stopped the van and Miriam and I stared at the stones.

“We’re only eight or nine kilometers from the Wadi el Mujib,” Miriam said. “After we enter the wadi, we’ll have to go a few more kilometers before we begin to climb. For now, just drive ahead.” She glanced at the compass mounted on the dashboard. “We’re headed in the right direction.”

Without making any kind of reply, I merely looked in disgust at the surrounding countryside. Other than a bird flying in the distance, nothing moved, the air itself as still as death. Ever since sunrise we had picked our way through rocks that had gradually grown into hills, hills that had become larger and larger, until now there were huge masses of granite and limestone on all sides, the slopes covered with loose rock and blue-gray shale, the heights of such that many places were secure from the blast furnace of a sun. This explained why the area was crisscrossed with deep black shadows.

Time crawled by and so did the mileage. Gradually, meter by meter, we closed in on the wadi and finally the oversized tires were pressing into the dry riverbed filled with various sized rocks polished smooth by the water that flowed during the very short rainy season. On either side the high slanted walls of the wadi loomed over us; yet I could see that neither side would be difficult or dangerous to climb. There were plenty of rocky projections and numerous foot and hand holds.

Slowly and carefully I drove the van down the wadi, now and then thinking of how easy it would be for an enemy on the slopes to ambush us, either with a sub-gun or a well-aimed grenade. The hell with it; risk was part of the business. Anyhow, this was still better than going sheeplike through life listening to your arteries become brittle.

At length Miriam said, “Do you see where the river bed curves up ahead? Just beyond the bend you’ll see an old rusted jeep. Stop there.”

“What’s a jeep doing there?”

She must have detected a note of suspicion in my voice, for she replied half-angrily, “How should I know? It’s been there for as long as I can remember. Someone drove it up there years ago and the motor quit. How else could it have gotten there?”

I edged the van forward, ignoring the sweat running down my face, and tried to calculate how far we were from the Syrian-Jordanian border. But it was impossible to know the exact distance; there had been too many twists and turns. I estimated that we had about twenty miles to go. I also sensed that Miriam was giving me quick sideway glances.

I said, “Is this the route you always used when you visited the camp?”

“Several times,” she said. “Other times we used the shorter route. Several miles from here, to the north, there’s a road that leads up onto the high part where the camp is.”

“Are you saying that the route we’re on is seldom used?”

“Almost never, as far as I know. The SLA uses the other road.”

“Then why did you use this route those other times?” I gave her a brief glance and saw resentment flashing in her eyes.

“So that’s it! You don’t trust me!” she said angrily. “That’s why you’re asking me all these questions. Damn you! I don’t have to answer them!”

“Then don’t blame me for having doubts!” I snapped and speeded up over a stretch of sunbaked clay. “You and your brother are double agents. To me that means it’s a toss-up whether you’re double-crossing AXE or the SLA!”

Detecting that Miriam was not only infuriated but taken aback by my bluntness, I slowed the van when we came to the beginning of the bend in the riverbed.

“It just so happens that a landslide blocked the other road,” she said, obviously trying to control her voice. “It took months to clear the rocks; all the work had to be done by hand. It was during that time that we used this route.”

I still wasn’t convinced, but I said, “You should have told me that in the first place, even if you can’t prove it.”

“And since we’re having this little chat,” she went on, “I know that ‘Joseph Allen Galloway’ is a cover name. You’re Nick Carter! Now tell me I’m wrong!”

I merely chuckled and kept my eyes straight ahead. “What makes you think I’m Nick Carter, whoever he might be?”

“Come off it, Nick,” she half-sneered. “For a mission of this magnitude, AXE would send only the best. And it’s common knowledge in certain circles that one Nick Carter is the best AXE has to offer. Conclusion: You have to be Nick Carter.”

A nod to a blind man is as good as a wink. If I neither confirmed nor denied my identity, she would still have to have a one percent element of doubt, not that it made a damn bit of difference at this stage of the game.

“You can call me by any name you want,” I said. “My only interest is in getting to the top of one of the walls and pinpointing the location of the Hawk’s camp.”

“There’s the jeep up ahead,” she said, “right where I said it would be. And just in case you’re wondering how I know the way to the top, I climbed the left face with Ahmed once while we were out here looking for ancient artifacts. Of course, you don’t believe me.”

I ignored the nails in her voice, which may have been the reason she added, “Well, do you or don’t you?”

“Whether I do or don’t” — and I had my doubts — “we’re here,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.

I parked the van to the right of the jeep which sat on its wheel-rims, the rims buried in the hard clay. The tires had rotted long ago, and the water had washed away the rubber. Wind had sandblasted away the paint and the jeep was caked with reddish rust. Of World War II vintage, the wreck looked not only pathetic but ridiculous. It was something that was but shouldn’t be.

Miriam pointed to the right. “Over there,” she said. “We can climb to the top over there. That’s the way Ahmed and I went. It was only a few months ago.”

“I’ll get the stuff,” I said, putting on my shirt. I went to the rear, strapped on a Luger waist holster, shoved Wilhelmina into the oiled leather and closed the flap. I picked up the carry-all shoulder bag, containing the sextant, the celestial computer, the camera and other equipment, and slipped the strap over my shoulder. I next opened the gun locker and took out the AK-47, the Skorpion machine pistol and two shoulder bags of spare magazines for each weapon. On the other side of me, Miriam, who had opened another locker and had taken out two pairs of Zeiss binoculars, handed me one of the cases, a friendly smile on her sensuous mouth. I gave her the AK-47 assault rifle and the bag filled with spare clips.

She smiled again. “Let’s not forget the canteens.”

A few minutes later, we were outside the van and headed for the left-side face, Miriam leading the way to a very tiny gully in the slope that was almost perpendicular, a depression only slightly larger than a fifteen-foot wide ditch.

“We’ll have to be very careful,” Miriam said when we reached the face. “As you can see, there are numerous hand-holds, and the side is not all that steep. But if we grab a loose rock, or step on one, we could fall.”

We looked up the face of the wall. To reach the top, we’d have to climb almost two hundred feet. The climb would indeed be dangerous, particularly since we had automatic weapons strapped to our backs and were weighed down with canvas shoulder bags.

The climb took us the better part of an hour, and by the time we pulled ourselves over the top edge, we were dripping sweat and Miriam was exhausted, although the climb had only been a good workout for me.

I saw at once that she had told the truth. The top of the cliff was nothing more than a small plateau filled with enormous granite and limestone boulders partially covered with chalky marl. Surprisingly there were stunted juniper trees growing among the boulders, amidst small bushes of qat, a narcotic plant that is chewed and has an effect similar to marijuana. But I didn’t see any camp! To the south was the top of the other wadi wall and more hills. To the east, north and the west were hills and more hills of limestone and granite, many of which were crowned with bizarre shaped pinnacles of soft tufa stone. The openings of caves dotted the bases of many of the hills.

Miriam finished drinking from her canteen. “We’ve got to go six hundred feet or so to the northwest to see the base,” she said. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”

She screwed the cap on the canteen, pushed back her wide-brimmed straw hat and wiped her forehead with a large silk handkerchief.

It didn’t take us long, on the more-or-less level ground, to cover the distance to the edge of the plateau. Before we reached the end, Miriam, who was ten feet in front, motioned for me to get down. We crawled the rest of our way on our hands and knees, finally coming to the very edge and taking positions between two enormous boulders.

“There it is, Nick,” Miriam said smugly, “the camp of Mohammed Bashir Karameh. I said I’d lead you to it and I have.”

Through the binoculars I could see that the base was much larger than I had imagined, in spite of Miriam’s having told me that there were usually three to four hundred men and women at the camp, ninety-nine percent of them terrorists.

I studied the layout, noting each feature. In the center of the camp were the remains of the Tower of Lions. But it wasn’t a tower. It was an immense square building of stone, without any roof and with only three stories remaining, half of the south wall in ruins. To the northeast of the tower was a long, low building also built of stone, all of it underneath camouflaged netting. Miriam told me that it was used as a storehouse.

To the southwest were scores of small, mud-built and windowless huts, each with a small opening to permit smoke to escape. Scattered in between and around the huts were tents made of woven black goat fleece, each tent supported by poles that varied in length so that both the top and the side walls sloped. I could see people moving around the tents and the houses, but the distance was too great to see their faces clearly.

What surprised me the most were the vehicles parked side by side underneath a tremendous scattered-leaf pattern netting supported by high poles. Two jeeplike command cars, six L-59 Gronshiv armored cars, a dozen personnel carriers, three of which were half-tracks and also Russian, and two T-54 tanks with 140-millimeter cannons!

I didn’t lower the binoculars as I asked Miriam why she hadn’t mentioned the armor.

“You didn’t ask me!” she said indignantly. “What’s the difference? There they are.”

“I’m not blind,” I snapped. “I’m only wondering why all that heavy stuff is down there.”

“I don’t know,” Miriam shrugged. “You’ll have to ask al-Huriya, or one of his aides. Khalil Marras for example.”

Suspecting that she was mocking me, I shoved the binoculars into their case, gave her a dirty look and crawled to the rear of the boulder, to the side that could not be seen from the SLA camp below. Miriam crawled to the back of the opposite boulder, a smile on her face. Or was it a smirk?

Down on one knee, I took off the two shoulder bags, opened one and removed the camera and the collapsible tripod. Thirty feet across from me, Miriam took off her sunglasses, lit a cigarette and lazily blew smoke in my direction.

I was about to take the tripod and camera and return to the edge when I caught a brief glimpse of a man, who had reared up from behind a boulder twenty feet to my rear, but had not ducked down fast enough. In that split second, I realized that it was too much of a coincidence for one of the SLA to have just happened along. I’d been had in spades. Miriam Kamel had led me into a trap.

I dropped the camera and tripod, pulled Wilhelmina from her holster and thumbed off the safety. The man I had spotted, realizing I had seen him, jumped up from behind the boulder, a fierce look on his face and a Russian PPsH submachine gun in his hands. I snap-aimed, pulled Wilhelmina’s trigger and the Luger cracked, the terrorist jerking from the slug that thudded into his forehead. His eyes open and staring into eternity, he dropped the machine gun and crumpled to the ground.

As if Wilhelmina’s sharp crack had been a signal, the other SLA terrorists jumped up from their hiding places behind boulders. I saw in that instant that what they had done was to creep up behind me and Miriam and form a semicircle to our rear. Not having time to count them, I saw only that they were dressed in khaki pants and shirts, wore combat boots and had their heads covered with kaffiyehs. Their weapons were sidearms and automatic weapons.

“Don’t kill him!” Miriam yelled. “Al-Huriya wants him alive!”

I didn’t have one chance in a million of escaping, but I was determined to put up a hell of a fight before they chopped me apart.

The terrorists, the white neck cloths of their kaffiyehs flying, charged toward me. I rushed toward the nearest SLA killer and cut him down with a flying doubled-legged piston kick. At the last moment, I straightened out my legs so that my thigh muscles had a chance to get into the act. My feet crashed into the man’s midsection and he screamed.

While the man went flying backward, I spun my body around and dropped facedown, breaking my fall with my feet and left hand. My surprised move had disorganized the terrorists, their momentary confusion giving me the opportunity to jump to my feet and make Wilhelmina snarl. She did, twice, and two more men cried out in pain. One went down with a bullet through the groin, all the gasping sounds a requiem to his final seconds of life. The second man fell against another terrorist, my bullet, hitting him at an angle, having gone through his lungs.

The remaining Syrians closed in on me. Ducking the barrel of a machine gun swung at my head, I was about to put a 9mm hollow point into another of my attackers when a powerful hand grabbed my right wrist and an arm slid around my throat. I used the point of my left elbow to smash into the man’s ribs. He howled and fell to one side, pulled his arm from my neck.

As the man holding my right wrist twisted Wilhelmina away from me, I used my left hand to jab him in the hollow of the throat, at the same time kicking backward to flatten the stomach of a man trying to slam me between the shoulder blades with the barrel of his sub-gun.

But I was fighting a losing battle. Again I was grabbed — both arms this time — and pulled in opposite directions.

I had been in this sort of fix before and knew what the two Syrians were thinking: that there wasn’t anything I could do. But with my legs and feet I could do plenty. I kicked up with my right leg and drove my foot underneath the chin of the man holding my right arm. A long, low sound of agony jumped from his throat and he went down, unconscious.

The man holding my left arm thought that he was going to get help from a man darting at me to my right. They both got a surprise! With my left foot I stomped down as hard as I could on the right instep of the man hanging on to my arm, and felt his tarsus bone splinter. Immediately I delivered a pulverizing blow to the other man’s abdomen. He gasped loudly, his eyes bugged out and he became as helpless as a newborn baby.

All of a sudden, someone knocked my right leg out from under me, and I started to fall to the right. Before I could recover my balance, a fist slammed against the left side of my head and a man threw himself on my back and kicked my left leg out from under me. Helpless but still struggling, I went down, the weight of the man’s body pinning me, sharp stones cutting into my face. Something smashed against the back of my head. Stars exploded inside my head and a black velvet curtain dropped over my brain.

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.

Chapter Eight

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!”

“Why complain about peace if the Palestinians get their state in the deal?”

“The hell with the dumb Palestinians!” Karameh said mercilessly. “Those fellahin never had a state at any time. Why should they have one now? All the talk about a state for the Palestinians is nothing but propaganda put out by that idiot Arafat and his PLO fools. They machine gun to death a bus load of women and children and call it a ‘victory!’ I spit on that pig Arafat. Everytime he makes a move, he does Israel a favor by invoking world sympathy for the Zionists! My goal is more glorious and honorable. I intend to destroy Israel completely! I intend to push every damned Zionist into the Mediterranean!” He laughed obscenely. “Those who can’t swim, we’ll cut their throats.”

“I rather think that the Israelis will have something to say about that,” I said drily.

“Not without America supplying them arms they won’t!” he snapped. “It’s impossible for the Israelis to fight a long war without their destroyed equipment being replaced immediately by the American government!”

There was no way around it: Mohammed Karameh was nuttier than the man who insisted he could make a fortune by operating a cemetery for pet rocks! But what he could do and what he thought he could were two different matters. He was deadly serious and that’s what made him so very dangerous. It was not inconceivable that a fanatic like Karameh could accidentally trigger a full scale war, perhaps even World War III. My real worry was that I wouldn’t be able to get to Pierre. To do so, I had to be alone. At the moment, I had to admit that my chances were zero. To compound my misery, my knees were beginning to ache, but I didn’t want Karameh, and especially Miriam, to know it.

“You’re using corkscrew logic, Karameh,” I said. “Killing a million Americans with liquefied natural gas isn’t going to make Uncle Sam stop supplying Israel with arms. The only thing you’ll accomplish is to make the American people hate the entire Arab world. You might even cause Washington to drop an H-bomb on Damascus!”

“Your government of weaklings wouldn’t dare!” sneered Karameh, thrusting his head forward. “Your leaders are midgets and cowards!”

“You might find that those ‘cowards’ are really Samsons,” I countered, stalling for time while I tried to think of some solution.

“No matter,” said Karameh, spreading his hands. “You will not be around to see it. I will tell you another reason why we leaked the gas project to AXE: to test their effectiveness. That is also why Comrade Miriam led you here and why you were not killed in Damascus. You are going to tell us everything you know about AXE Control, how its worldwide network operates.”

“You’re a dreamer, Karameh,” I said.

“You are then going to contact the Hamosad Tel Aviv Control station by shortwave radio and supposedly give them the location of this base, only the coordinates will be many miles from here, across the border in Jordan.”

“I would say that the Jordanians would be rather annoyed if Israeli planes blow hell out of the place,” I said.

“Exactly. We’re counting on that silly little nation to raise a stink in the U.N. against the Zionists. But that has nothing to do with you and your problem. I will tell you that, if you cooperate, after you tell us what we want to know, I personally will give you a bullet in the back of the neck and put you out of your misery.”

The nerve of the son of a bitch! I felt like jumping up and trying to whack out Karameh with only my feet and legs. To even try would have been an exercise in futility. He was too far away, and he appeared to be a man of good reflexes, a man who was very fast. And what could I accomplish by getting myself half-beaten to death? I needed my strength for what I had to do. Provided I’d get a chance to do it.

I smiled condescendingly at Karameh. “In short, you’re asking me to hurry up and die! Then again, maybe that’s part of your Moslem or revolutionary philosophy?”

“Allah el Akbar!” Karameh said firmly. “I do what I must to defeat the enemies of Allah. The main enemy is world Zionism!”

“Well,” I drawled, “I sort of favor that passage in the Bible that says, In my Father’s house are many mansions. If I were you, I’d have second thoughts about moving day.”

Within my own thoughts, I wasn’t at all surprised that Karameh could combine Marxism with the religion of Islam. After all, the two murders of conscience, stupidity and fanaticism, are its best impersonators.

There were loud, angry mutterings from the circle of men surrounding me and it didn’t take any stretch of my imagination to know what they would have liked to do to me, and probably would, if I couldn’t get to Pierre. Freeing myself from the handcuffs was only the first part of the problem. Even with my hands free, what could I do? Where could I go? I could do plenty. And when it was all over with, I’d probably be in hell!

One of the men to my left spoke up in a loud voice. “Leader, the infidel has insulted Allah. For that we should punish him with torture!”

Dressed in qamiss and burnoose, the snow-white piece of cloth across his forehead indicated that the bearded speaker was a Khatib — who leads the Moslem community in daily prayer — of the fanatical Ismaili sect.

“The holy one is right!” thundered another man in the circle. Puffing on a narghile, a water-cooled pipe with several mouthpieces, he sat to my right. “The Western child of the devil has dared to compare the god of the Christians with mighty Allah. We cannot ignore such an insult.”

Ahmed Kamel was more practical. “Mohammed, Carter is only stalling for time,” he said, staring in hatred at me. “Make him give us the vital information, then kill the dog.”

For a man who supposedly had been in the hospital, he looked remarkably well, I thought. I didn’t enjoy the private joke. I was too close to death to be amused.

My eyes went to Miriam, who looked as if she could no longer contain herself. She turned to Karameh. “Nick Carter will never divulge anything of value.” Her voice was out of rhythm and there was a slight tremor in it. “I tell you, I know him. All we’ll get from him are lies and more lies.”

All this time, Karameh sat with his cheeks drawn in, his mouth locked tight and his hands clenched into fists; yet I could detect amusement in his eyes. I suspected that he was one clever con artist who actually didn’t believe in either Allah or Marxism, any more than I did, and that he was using the SLA for his own personal self-aggrandizement.

He finally said, “We will proceed in a manner I think best. I am the Leader.” The tone of his voice indicated that the matter of my being tortured was settled and closed to further discussion.

He was so sure of himself, so confident and satisfied and convinced as he looked at me. “You’re a realist, Carter. I know that a man like you is not afraid of death. I also know you’re not a fool. You’re not anxious to be tortured. Now tell me, where is AXE Control located in Tel Aviv?”

I looked straight at the Arab terrorists.

“Go to hell!”

Karameh jumped to his feet, rushed over to me and let me have a right cross to the jaw that knocked me on my back and sent comets rocketing back and forth inside my head, not to mention my jaw which felt as if it had been hit by a sledgehammer.

Miriam and her brother jumped to their feet. So did Khalil Marras and half a dozen other men, some of them advancing on me.

Karameh held up both hands. “Wait! An unconscious man is no good to us.”

“He won’t be any good to us conscious either!” Miriam practically shouted. “I say bum out one of his eyes to give him a taste of what he can expect from his lies.”

“We will give him a chance to think it over,” Karameh snarled, glaring down at me. “Even healthy men have been known to drop dead. I don’t want to take the chance of his dying under torture.”

He motioned to the guards in the front of the tent and eight of them hurried forward. “Get him to his feet. We’ll show him what we do to enemies of Allah.”

Two of the guards reached down, hooked their hands in my armpits and pulled me to my feet. Karameh gave me a final look, then turned and started toward the entrance. Everyone followed, one of the guards giving me a vicious shove.

A solemn procession, we marched from the headquarters tent and proceeded in a northern direction. When we passed one end of the line of armored cars, personnel carriers and the two T-54 tanks, I noticed that underneath the netting was a sheet of canvas to protect the vehicles from the sun. I also saw that the hatches of the ACs and of the tanks were open, to keep the air circulating. My greatest surprise came when I saw several men passing 140 mm shells through the loader’s hatch of the end tank. Why? What could the SLA attack up here? Or, could it be that Karameh and his people were afraid? Of who?

As we neared the Tower of Lions, I saw that the ruins were tremendous, much larger than they had appeared earlier, than each wall was at least one hundred fifty feet long and that the stones, very large, were covered with kliyiq, a kind of moss found in the As-Suwayda hills region.

We went to the north side of the tower, and I knew immediately that this was our destination. The north side was shaded — at least for now it was — and contained an arbor made of stout wooden poles. A group of Arabs were gathered around it, some standing, others squatting, but all of them enjoying the suffering of the three victims. No women were present, no doubt because the victims were naked.

Mohammed Karameh went underneath one end of the arbor and turned and nodded to the guards surrounding me. Two of them grabbed me by the arms and pulled me up to him. He was heavier and an inch or two taller than I; but even if he had been only three feet tall, I was at a hundred percent disadvantage. On one side of Karameh was Khalil Marras, his eyes glazed from the qat he was chewing. To the right of Karameh were Miriam and Ahmed Kamel. Miriam didn’t seem at all embarrassed by the nakedness of the victims.

“Carter, what you see is a mild taste of what we will do to you, if you do not cooperate,” Karameh said cynically, waving his hand toward the three victims and looking at me.

What I saw now I had seen before, in Vietnam... methods of torture that the South Viets had used against the Vietcong. Blindfolded, his ankles tied together, one man hung by his hands which were tied above his head and suspended from one of the cross poles. Several men were smearing his body with some substance — no doubt some kind of sweet syrup.

I don’t know what name the Arabs gave to this form of torture, but in South Vietnam it was called “The Bath of Flies.” In the right climate, where flying insects are prevalent, the victim will be covered with thousands of buzzing insects within minutes and will begin to scream hideously. As far as I knew, no one had ever died from the Bath of Flies; however, if allowed to hang for two or three hours, the victim could be overcome by irreparable insanity.

The second man was being tortured by “The Ghruka Scissors,” a method often employed by the Indian Secret Service. He sat on his butt, his arms securely bound behind his back, his legs locked around a three foot high pole, the torture consisting in how his legs were fixed around the post. The right foot was placed in the crook of the opposite knee, while the post, forward of the left foot, was between the arch and the crook of the right knee. This awkward and inescapable position causes excruciating pain in the knee and pelvic joints. From the look of extreme agony on the man’s face, it was plain that he had been held this way for several hours.

The third man, bearded like the other two, was groaning loudly. He had good reason to. Being tortured in “The Stork” position, he was suspended from a horizontal pole by his hands which were bound behind him and had to support almost all of his weight, since his feet were barely touching the ground.

“Ah-ha!” Karameh said merrily. He glanced at me, then at the poor devil suffering the Bath of Flies. “Soon the fun will begin.”

There was a loud buzzing sound in the air, generated by the thousands of insects crawling over the man’s body. Then a cry of intolerable torment came from his mouth, his body jerking with such violence that the entire arbor shook.

Karameh turned suddenly and slapped me hard across the face, a backhanded blow that stung like fire and rattled my teeth.

“I will give you exactly one hour to think it over, Carter,” he said venomously. “At the end of that time, you will tell me what I want to know, or I personally will go to work on you. I’ll keep you alive and screaming for months!”

“And I’ll help him!” hissed Miriam. All the while she glared at me her face twisted with cruelty and hatred.

“Throw him in with the other pigs,” ordered Karameh.

The guards — two in front of me, two behind and one on each side — hurried me across the hundred foot space, toward the end of the south side of the long stone building. One of the Arabs jerked open the thick door, two others shoved me inside, and I found that we were in a short, narrow passage. There was a door across from me, in the wall, and a door at each end of the passage. The door at the west end was ordinary, but the one at the opposite end was covered with a steel bar placed horizontally across it.

One of the machine gun carrying Arabs removed the round bar from the door and jerked it open. Two other SLA terrorists shoved me through the doorway into the room. The door slammed shut and, as I looked around in the half-dark room, I heard the bar being replaced over the front of the door.

Ten men, sitting against the walls, stared back at me.

Chapter Nine

Although I’ve seen a lot of misery in almost every nation on earth, the men in the makeshift jail were ten of the most pathetic human beings I had ever cast my eyes on. Their clothes, so caked with dirt it was impossible to tell their original color, hung in tatters from bodies that were equally as filthy. Oddly enough, the majority of the men didn’t seem to be undernourished. I couldn’t be sure in the dim light.

I walked to the center of the room, and that’s when I saw the two other men lying on their backs on the straw-covered stone floor, in one corner of the room. I moved closer and looked down at them. Semiconscious, they wore only pants cut off at the thighs. Their bodies were discolored with blue, black and purple bruises and numerous cuts and sores, some of which were fairly recent; others were scabbed over. The eyes of one man were swollen shut and the left side of his face so distended that his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him.

The room itself smelled like the deepest part of a cesspool and was a haven for vermin crawling over the walls and ceiling and through the straw. The only light came from four small windows, two on each side of the room, set high in the walls, windows that were only foot-square openings in the stone.

The men stared suspiciously at me. I myself wondered if they were part of some clever ploy of Karameh, all geared to trick me into revealing information. Every man had a full beard and hair that had not been cut in months; they had to be crawling with lice. Although the light was dim, I could make out two men with blond hair and definite Nordic-Alpine features.

During those few seconds as we stared at each other, screams of excruciating agony poured through the window. It seemed the terrorists had hoisted the man being tortured in the stork position, all the way off the ground. His arms, bound behind his back, had to support his full weight, which had to have dislocated his shoulders.

“Who are you?” I asked, assuming that the three men being tortured had been a part of this ragged group.

I saw that my use of English surprised the men; just the same, they continued to regard me with an animosity that grew by the seconds.

Staring defiantly at me, one of the men stood up and said in slightly accented English, “Go tell Karameh that sending you in here was a waste of time. We don’t have any secrets to tell, and if we did, we wouldn’t tell them.”

Pressed for time and needing proof of who they were before I made an effort to get to Pierre, I said harshly in Arabic, “I am convinced that Allah is the syphilitic son of a whore.”

Very often cultural instinct forces one to react faster than conscious, controlled thought. If the men were Moslem, rage should flicker briefly in their eyes before they caught themselves in realization of how I had tricked them with the filthy insult. But their eyes revealed only puzzlement, indicating that they had not understood what I had said. Rage was absent.

Evidently the man who was standing had understood, for he was actually smiling, as if amused. He turned and looked down at some of the others who were watching me with a mixture of contempt and bold disdain.

“This stupid SLA nut thinks he can trick us by pretending to insult his precious Allah! I’d think Karameh would have more sense.”

It was my turn to be mildly astonished. The man had spoken Hebrew. Before I could say anything, the man on his feet smiled mockingly at me and said in Arabic, “We agree with you. We think Allah is exactly what you said he is!”

Rapidly losing patience, I said in Hebrew, “If you’re Israelis, how did you get here and why are you in such good physical condition? You look like pigs, but you don’t look starved!”

The man in front of me stared, his mouth slack, his eyes uncertain. Five more of the men got to their feet, one of them, a tall man with a bitter face, looking intently at me but saying to the others in Hebrew, “Maybe he isn’t an SLA agent?”

“None of you have answered my questions!” I said harshly. “I don’t have time to play games. In less than an hour those sadists are going to make me wish I had never been born.”

The man who had first gotten to his feet said with a trace of friendly earnestness. “My name is Josef Risenberg. We were in the Israeli armed forces but were captured by the SLA when we went into southern Lebanon a year ago. Originally there were thirty-one of us. Once in a while Karameh exchanges one of us for one of his rank and file members. That’s why the SLA hasn’t deprived us of food. You can’t exchange dead men, and Karameh knows that if he starves us, our people at home will do the same to his men. But who are you?”

“I’m Nick Carter,” I said. “How I got here is a tale too long to tell right now. Let’s just say I’m the guy who’s going to get us out of here, unless you prefer to stay here and rot in your own filth.” Some of the Israelis, still suspicious of me, glanced in silence at each other.

“You don’t look like the Messiah to me, Carter!” Risenberg was highly skeptical. “And that’s who it would take to get us out of this rat-hole!”

“I’m not the Redeemer either, but I have a plan!”

“You’re serious! You’re really serious!” There was hope in Risenberg’s voice, and his words were a kind of plea.

“What’s behind the other two doors in the corridor in front?”

“The room on the north side is used for interrogation. That’s where they tortured the two who are unconscious. We think they’re with Israeli Intelligence. They have never said and we have never asked them. The door on the west end opens to a guard room.” His voice more excited, rang with hope. “If we could get inside that guard room, we’d have a chance. One wall is lined with assault rifles and machine guns.”

“A chance!” another man said. “What are you talking about, Josef? Where can we go? For God’s sake, we’re in the middle of hundreds of terrorists!”

The man got a reply from one of his fellow Israelis. “We’d be better off to die fighting, taking some of those psychopaths with us, than to live like this, to live worse than their dogs.” The man got to his feet and stared at me. “I’m with you, Carter!”

“Listen, all of you,” I said. “We do have a place to go — Jordan. There’s a lot of armored stuff out there, including two Russian tanks. On the way over here, I saw shells being loaded into one tank. Once we’re out of here, if we can get to those tanks, we can blow hell out of this camp, then get across the border into Jordan — at least in theory.”

“We know about the tanks,” Risenberg said. “For days the guards have been taunting us with how the SLA is going to attack a Jordanian village and leave behind evidence to point a finger at the PLO. That madman Karameh wants to create internal dissension among the Israeli haters. In this respect, I hope the son of a bitch is successful.”

The man standing next to Risenberg looked at me as though I were stark raving mad. “But we can’t get out of here! The guards always keep their guns trained on us whenever they enter. Besides, you’re handcuffed.”

“Tell me something I don’t know!” I said. “I’ve less than forty-five minutes to get out of these bracelets before the guards come for me. If—”

“You’ve less time than that before the first group of guards come in,” Risenberg cut in, looking at a shaft of light slanting through one of the windows on the north side. “The guards bring us the evening meal at five. Right now, it’s about four-thirty.”

“How do you know?”

“The way the light slants through the north-side windows. I developed the system to keep my mind active.” He went over to the north side of the room, tapped a stone with the tip of his foot and looked at me. “This stone is five o’clock. See where the one column of sunlight ends, where it hits the floor? Right now, I’d say it’s between four-thirty and four-forty. But it’s like Jacob said, how are you going to get out of those cuffs?”

“Watch me!” I glanced at the door, then said to Risenberg. “Go over to the door and keep an eye on the corridor. If any guards pop out, let me know.”

Mystified, Risenberg went over to the door and looked through the tiny square opening. The rest of the Israelis stared at me. I went to work. I wriggled my cuffed hands underneath my shirt, squirming them past my belt, inside my pants and shorts until they reached my genitals. With a slight grunt, I yanked the small, slender tube taped behind my scrotum and slid it into my fingers. Hurriedly, I inched my hands upward and back outside my pants, holding the tube that contained Pierre tightly.

The Israelis, grouped around me, watched with fascination and amazement.

“Can we help?” one of them asked.

“No, I must do it,” I said. Actually there wasn’t anything they could have done, even if it hadn’t been for deadly little Pierre, so small he was only one-third the size of a marble. It wasn’t his size but what he contained that made him so extremely dangerous — hydro-chlorsarsomasine, a nerve gas that killed faster than pure hydrocyanic acid. Anyhow, I could work faster by touch alone than by taking time to tell the men what to do.

I placed the section of the tube containing Pierre on the floor, retaining the other half in my left hand. With the thumb and forefinger of my other hand, I tilted the tube and reached for the lock picks inside, hoping desperately that my fingers wouldn’t be too numb to do the job. I selected a Number Six lock pick and began working on the left cuff.

Several minutes later, the handcuffs were on the floor and my wrists were free. I quickly screwed the tube together again, and dropped it into my pocket. I looked over at Risenberg, who nodded slowly, telling me that none of the guards were in sight.

“All right, Carter. So you’re free,” a man said in a low voice. “But we’re still a long way from getting out of here. By the way, my name is Cham Elovitz.”

The other young men introduced themselves — Benjamin Sahl, John Ivinmetz, Lev Wymann... and other names, all Jewish. I assumed that the two blonds, Karl Nierman and Jacob Keifer, had been immigrants from West Germany to Israel.

“Each time the guards come in they’re heavily armed,” Lev Wymann said, “and they watch to make sure we don’t try anything.”

“They might not feed us tonight until after they take Carter out,” Benjamin Sahl offered.

“What’s the procedure when they bring you food?” I asked. “Do they make you line up against the wall or take some other kind of precautionary measure?”

“Four of them come in,” Sahl said. “Two guards and two other men. One man carries the pot or a sack. The other guy has tin plates and spoons. The two guards stand by the door while the other two pass out the slop. Grabbing for the gun-carrying guards would be impossible.”

“That’s right,” sighed Karl Nierman, “and they’re not going to be any less careful tonight.”

“How far inside the door do the guards stand?” I asked.

“Six, seven... maybe eight feet,” Nierman replied. “It depends where we’re sitting when they come in. What’s the difference? They have guns. We’re still at a disadvantage.”

I looked at the handcuffs in my right hand. “We have one advantage. They believe I’m cuffed. I’ll tell you how we’ll do it. Eight of you sit against the east wall. Sahl, you and I and Risenberg will sit by the south wall, near the center. Do any of you have training in karate?”

Sahl Solomon chuckled. “Sure, we know Gobat, the Israeli version of karate. It’s a blending of all the oriental variants.”

“Let’s get into position,” I said. Ben Sahl and I hurried to the south wall. The other Israelis moved to the east side of the room and sat down. Sitting toward the center of the wall, I put one cuff around my right wrist and pushed the prong slightly into the locking section, making sure that the prong’s first notch did not move past the lock catch. Putting my hands behind my back, I used the same method on my left wrist. All I had to do was move my hands slightly and the cuffs would fall off.

With Sahl sitting to my right and Risenberg watching through the small opening of the door, the ten Israelis and I waited.

Five o’clock came.

The guards did not bring the evening meal.

I watched the end of the one shaft of light as it moved ever so very slowly to the southeast corner of the room. I judged it was about five-thirty when we heard the door to the outside open. Risenberg didn’t have to tell us that the guards were entering the building. A strained, anxious look on his face, he hurried over to me and Sahl and sat down to my left.

Moments later, we heard the iron bar being removed from across the door to the prison room. Then the door was pulled open and five Arabs stormed into the room, two carrying AK-47 assault rifles slung across their shoulders, the other three holding Russian PPsH submachine guns. From where we sat, Risenberg, Sahl and I could see a sixth Arab waiting out in the corridor. He was holding a 9mm UZI submachine gun. Much to our chagrin, we saw that several other Arabs were standing in the open door of the guard room, at the west end of the corridor, and were smirking.

I stood up, afraid that if I waited to let the guards jerk me to my feet the handcuffs would fall off. Two of them advanced, one saying in a loud voice, “This time, you offspring of a pig, you will tell al-Huriya what he wants to know, or we’ll begin by breaking your fingers one by one.”

When the two Arabs closest to me reached for my arms, I decided it was now or never. I flicked my wrists, the handcuffs dropped to the floor and my arms streaked upward and out with such speed that the Arabs had no chance to defend themselves. Using Karate as we planned, I bunched the fingers of my left hand into a Nukite spear, stabbing into the neck of one guard. It felt as thought I was slicing through a hardening mush; yet I knew in that instant that I had hit the target and that the Arab was only seconds away from oblivion.

I hadn’t missed the Arab to my right either, my Shuto sword-hand chop smashing into his throat. He gagged in agony, dropped the machine gun as his wind pipe started to swell shut, and began to sink to the floor.

Simultaneously, Sahl employed a top of the foot Kogan geri kick to wreck the sex department of one of the guards in front of me and Risenberg gave the fourth terrorist a lightning quick side-thrust kick to the belly and grabbing the man’s PPsH machine gun with both hands.

The fifth guard leaped forward to crack open the side of Risenberg’s head with the barrel of his PPsH. I made a mess of his plan by seizing the weapon with both hands and, as I twisted the barrel toward the ceiling, kneeing him in the groin as hard as I could. As I had anticipated, the explosion of pain made him release the sub-gun which I let fall to the floor. I slammed him across the side of the head with my right hand, then grabbed his shirt front with my left hand, slid my right hand between his legs, lifted him up and pitched him head-on into the sixth guard who was charging through the door. The unconscious body of the man I had laid out crashed into the big Arab, who let out a yell of rage and fell backward through the door, the weight of the other man forcing him to the floor, and startling the two men who had been in the doorway of the guardroom.

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.

Chapter Ten

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 familiarize 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.

Slipping into the gunner’s chair, I felt the tank shudder and the powerful V5-600-hp diesel roar into life. A moment later, I heard Risenberg shift gears and move the tank out, its track links clanking, the rollers and sprockets creaking.

To my right, Lev Wymann pushed down the cam-lever, pulled open the breech and shoved a 140mm armor-piercing shell into the chamber of the big gun. He then closed the breech and locked the cam-lever. The gun now was ready to be fired electrically. All I had to do was press the button.

I was about to peer through the gunner’s periscope when a red light began flashing on the control panel. I flipped the switch that turned on the intercom and heard Risenberg’s voice come through the tiny speaker, “Who’s the gunner?”

“It’s me, Carter,” I said.

“I’m going to move us about ninety feet from the other tank. Then you can blast it. Do you know how?”

“I know how. I’ve fought in a tank before,” I said, realizing that I was not only annoyed but afraid that I might never see Wilhelmina or Hugo again.

Far to the left we all heard a huge explosion with ten times the force of a dozen grenades. Solomon, turning the commander’s periscope, gleefully explained the explosion. “It’s Lomsky and Nierman. They’ve moved out in the armored car and have just lobbed a shell into the Tower.” His voice was suddenly worried. “We’d better hurry. Syrians are getting into the other tank.”

At this close range, I knew I wouldn’t have to do much aiming. I looked through the gunner’s periscope which was synchronized with the range finder. One hand on the wheel that elevated the gun in the manlet, my feet on the turret-turn pedals, I dropped the barrel and moved the turret until the reticle pattern in the scope was where I wanted it and the “V” of the sight was centered on the mark. The driver of the other tank was just starting the engine as I pushed the firing button and the gun roared.

My AP shell had hit low in the rear of the turret, had bored through the armor and had exploded. Enormous tongues of flame burst out on all sides of the enemy tank and the shells in the ammo bin exploded with a gigantic roar. The 140mm gun and parts of the turret were flung thirty feet into the air while the rest of the tank became a huge ball of red-yellow fire and dissolved into hundreds of pieces of burning metal. Jagged bits of junk rained down harmlessly on our own tank at the same time that the barrel and part of the manlet clanked loudly to the ground. I couldn’t see a trace of the Syrians who had been inside the T-54.

I rotated the gunner’s scope and saw Lomsky and Nierman in their L-59 Gronshiv doing their best to blow the base apart with the armored car’s 50mm cannon. There were four large holes, made by explosions, in the Tower of Lions. Men and women terrorists were running back-and-forth in panic. To the west of the Tower, Lomsky and Nierman’s shell had exploded the fuel dump and flames, wrapped in oily black smoke, were shooting a hundred feet into the early evening sky, spoiling what would have been a beautiful sunset.

But Lomsky and Nierman were far from safe. The SLA were using the other armored cars to stop them, even a few personnel carriers tried to run them down. There was suddenly a tremendous crashing sound against one side of the tank, one that momentarily made our senses reel and made me feel that I was inside a steel drum and that someone had pounded on it with a sledge hammer.

Lev Wymann, who had extracted the empty shell casing from the gun and had thrust in a fresh shell, slammed shut the breech and locked the cam-lever. “Some idiot in one of the armored cars hit us with a fifty millimeter shell. The fool should know that a fifty mil job can’t even scratch us. AT-54’s pannier plates are two hundred mils thick. The turret and glacis plates armor is two hundred thirty mils. Nothing less than a one hundred forty mil shell could stop us.”

I felt the big tank turning to the northwest as Risenberg’s voice came through the intercom, “Carter, I’m going to move forward. Try to get the armored cars and the carriers.”

“That’s what I had in mind,” I said. I looked through the scope and listened to the bogie wheels turning and the tracks clanking. I caught the armored car in the “V” and pressed the firing button. The big gun roared and the L-59 Gronshiv became a ball of burning metal tossed up and down on jets of air as hot as the inside of a blast furnace.

There was a loud clanking to my right. Wymann had jerked open the hot breech and the used shell casing had fallen to the floor. Another clank as he shoved in a new shell and locked the breech. There wasn’t any need for him to tell me when there was a shell in the chamber. The gun would not fire without the cam-lever being locked.

My hands spinning the azimuth wheel and the traverse control, I stared through the periscope which also served as the ranging scope sight. For the moment, I didn’t have to swing the turret because there was a fourteen-inch left and right traverse to the gun, the movements independent of the turret.

This time I demolished a personnel carrier. The 140 mm cannon roared; there was a loud noise, and the carrier flew apart. Huge chunks of ripped metal, and parts of bodies burnt black soared upward and came down over a wide radius, much of it falling on other tanks.

I saw through the scope that two carriers and three armored cars had succeeded in surrounding Lomsky and Nierman’s L-59 Gronshiv. Hurriedly, I zeroed in on one of the armored cars and pressed the firing button at the same time the three enemy Gronshivs, their cannons lined up on Lomsky and Nierman, fired in unison. The three shells hit the side of the vehicle only seconds apart from each other; this time, under the concentrated power of the three shells, the armor of Lomsky and Nierman’s fortress on wheels caved in. The vehicle exploded with a monstrous roar, steel plates, engine and rubber tires flying in every direction. I saw the bodies of Martin Lomsky and Karl Nierman kicked up into the air, then fall like broken dolls to the burning rubble scattered below.

Bennie Solomon called out from the commander’s chair, “Carter, one of the armored cars is headed for the building we were imprisoned in. Do you see it?”

I didn’t, but, as I moved the 140mm cannon, I did see very clearly the two personnel carriers that had helped to execute Lomsky and Nierman. Very quickly I spun the elevation wheel, waited for the reticle pattern, got it and pressed the button. The big gun thundered, the AP shell leaving the barrel on a flat trajectory and slamming midcenter into the carrier. A moment later there was an enormous blast that became a giant burst of fire and force which flung bodies and slabs of armor tumbling to the heavens. The rear of the carrier must have been filled with a full compliment of men because several dozen bodies hit the ground, their tattered clothes blazing.

The other carrier rolled quickly to the east before I could swing the muzzle of the gun on it. I was about to rotate the turret and look for a new target when suddenly the tank tilted slightly upward, the bogie wheels going up and down on their concentric springs. We were moving over something, rolling over something large. The tank then dipped and came down heavily, bouncing ever so slightly on its torsion bar springs.

I yelled into the intercom, “Risenberg, what the hell are you doing? Can’t you see where you’re going?”

“Sure, I have twenty-twenty vision,” he said easily. “I’m going to wreck their camp. I’m going to roll right through the tents and demolish their ant-hill houses. It’s easier with a tank than using shells — faster, too.”

I smiled to myself. “I’ll see what I can do about the carriers and the ACs that are left. But listen: Do you know what that big goatskin tent is?”

“Al-Huriya’s headquarters. I’m going to flatten it.”

“No, you’re not. I’m saving that tent for myself. You leave it alone.”

“Ok, my American friend. But you’re doing it the hard way.”

Risenberg crashed the tank into the black goatskin tents. The extra-wide tracks, supporting ninety-five tons of steel, became a giant press which crushed anything unlucky enough to find itself under the links, including men, women and children who had thought they would be safe inside their simple dwellings.

As I moved the muzzle of the gun to the northwest, Hawk popped into my mind, a twinge of resentment coloring my thoughts. No doubt he was somewhere in Tel Aviv, in an air-conditioned room, calmly waiting for my report and smoking one of those cheap cigars he habitually carried. When his time came to die, he’d drop into hell with one jammed in his mouth. Would he miss me if I caught a fatal slug? Maybe as long as a few days. I didn’t blame him; it was the nature of the trade we were in.

Rotating the telescope, I found the two Gronshiv armored cars parked close to the southeast end of the stone building in which the Israelis and I had been held captive. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like several men were carrying a recoilless RCL bazooka from the building to one of the tanks. Conceivably a modern-day bazooka could disable us, if not piercing the armor, at least wrecking the road wheels and the tracks.

Solomon, also seeing the Syrians, said nervously, “That’s a .3.7 incher. If they have AP shells, they could wreck us.”

Sweat pouring down my face, I consulted the graduation scale to the left of the scope and adjusted the calibration knob. We were about nine hundred feet from the armored cars and the stone building. At such a short distance, there was little need for me to judge range because my sight would be adjusted in line with the bore of the gun. The R-pattern appeared. The inverted “V” touched the right center side of the second armored car. I pressed the firing button, heard the 140mm cannon boom and watched the L-59 Gronshiv disappear in fire and smoke. The men who had been carrying the bazooka were on the ground, their bodies covered with orange and red flames.

Wymann pulled out an empty casing, inserted a fresh shell and closed the breech. Then that familiar sliding sound as he locked the lever. I hardly noticed, though, because I was too busy moving my gun to the left. I pressed the firing button and watched as the entire northwest side of the building exploded with a roar that seemed to shake the entire plateau, the force overturning the last armored car.

But where was Mohammed Bashir Karameh? And Miriam Kamel? Ahmed Kamel, and the rest of the top SLA trash? They could be dead. But my intuition told me that they were alive and not too far away.

The Tower of Lions? Miriam had told me that the lower part was used to store arms and ammunition. Had she lied? I’d soon find out. First I’d finish the job on the stone building. Within the next few minutes, I placed two more 140mm shells into what was left, and when the smoke had cleared only a part of the foundation remained.

“Carter, do you want to go to al-Huriya’s tent?” Risenberg’s voice came through the small speaker. I thought for a moment, listening to Cham Elovitz firing the Tokevski machine gun in the front hull.

“Yeah, after I put four or five shells in the bottom part of the Tower,” I said.

“Why the Tower? It’s only a pile of ruins.”

“Miriam Kamel told me the place was full of arms and ammo.”

“She lied,” Risenberg said. “There’s nothing in the Tower but rubble and memories.”

“We’ll see,” I said. I then proceeded to lob four shells into the east wall of the Tower, the explosions partially crumbling the wall. But there wasn’t any gigantic blast, no tremendous explosion that would have occurred had there have been cases of arms and ammo, especially grenades, stacked in the lower floor.

“Take us to the front of the Hawk’s tent,” I said in disgust to Risenberg. “Park us so that I can rake the tent with the topside gun.”

“As good as done,” Risenberg said.

The tank rumbled toward the huge black tent, the only one left standing. I got up from the gunner’s chair and motioned for Ben Solomon to take over.

“Carter, you’d better take this,” Lev Wymann said and handed me a 9 millimeter Heckler and Koch pistol that he had taken earlier from a dead terrorist. “It’s fully loaded.”

I shoved the H&K into my belt, climbed the short ladder fastened to the brace of the platform and pushed inward on the lever that opened the hatch over the commander’s cupola, on the right side of the turret. The hatch popped open and I got a whiff of burning cloth, goatskin and human flesh.

Gingerly, I poked my head above the hatch rim and looked around. In spite of the destruction, I could see men and women darting back-and-forth, running from one pile of wreckage to another. Risenberg continued to guide the tank toward the headquarters’ tent, not that I expected the Hawk and the others to be there waiting for me.

I stepped up higher on the platform, pulled the DShK closer to me and opened fire, the big machine gun roaring. Now and then there were screaming ricochets when slugs hit close to me on the turret, proof that I had become a target.

Suddenly, two SLA guerrillas — one a woman — popped up only thirty feet to the right of the tank, both at such an angle that none of our machine gun slugs could reach them. Instinctively I ducked down as the man lobbed a stick grenade and the woman, her long black hair flying, triggered off a burst of AK-47 fire. The grenade fell short and exploded against the right panier plates. Bits of shrapnel rained down, a few chunks stinging my cheek. Otherwise I was unhurt. I pulled the H&K from my belt, switched off the safety catch and leaned over the right side hatch rim. The man and woman had dropped to the ground as soon as the man had thrown the grenade. Now they were scrambling to their feet, both easy targets for the H&K. The man, his chest decorated with three holes, cried out and fell backward. The woman, stark terror on her face, did her best to raise the submachine gun, but she caught a slug between her breasts and another one in her throat, and she fell beside the man.

Risenberg turned the tank and within several minutes brought the T-54 twenty-five feet from the front of Karameh’s tent. The poles to the right had been torn loose and the goatskin hides were lying on the ground. The rest of the tent was intact and, as far as I could see, unmarred by bullet holes.

I grabbed the guide handle of the DShK and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Either I was out of ammo or the damned thing had jammed. I thought for a moment. Not a single shot had been fired from the tent. Was it empty? I was about to climb all the way out of the hatch and slide down the back of the turret when, feeling a tug on my left leg, I looked down and saw Ben Solomon looking up at me.

“Hold on, Carter. I’m going with you. There’s no sense in your doing it alone.”

Grateful for the help, I wasn’t about to argue with him. I crawled out of the hatch and Solomon followed, a Mauser “Red-9” machine pistol in his hand. We eased down the rear of the turret, crawled hurriedly across the hot transmission and engine louvres and dropped to the ground.

“I think we’re attacking empty space,” Solomon said. “No one’s in that tent. Al-Huriya would be crazy to stay in there and wait for us. He’s a psycho but he’s not a fool.”

“We’ll know in a moment. Are you ready?”

Solomon nodded.

“Then let’s do it.”

Chapter Eleven

Solomon and I charged the tent. We zigzagged through the wide main entrance, moved to the left and jumped behind a crate that was large enough to have held a refrigerator. For several moments we waited for our eyes to adjust to the gloom. Outside it was twilight; inside the tent it was almost dark. By the time we realized that we had jumped into a nest of terrorists, it was too late to turn back. They came at us from all sides, and we could only assume that they had hidden under rugs and had prepared themselves when they had heard the tank approach. Damn Karameh. He had planned it this way. He had assumed I would come back to the tent looking for him.

I killed two of the terrorists with the H&K, and Solomon gunned downed two more — one of his victims a woman — before they were all around us. Seven or eight, maybe nine or ten, one of them hissing, “al-Huriya wants them alive.”

The two Syrians closest to me, young and built like barrels, rushed in from the front, both swinging hamlike fists. I gave one man a knuckle strike between the eyes; he was unconscious and falling before he had time to blink. I let the second attacker have a pa-ko-hsia, my thumb and index finger jabbing into his throat, the terrible stab crushing both the left and the right jugular veins. I was certain of the damage because I know what I can do with Goju-Ryu karate.

From the corner of my eye, I could see that three men had rushed Solomon, coming at him from the front and from either side. He kicked one in the balls, chopped the second across the throat with a sword-ridge hand and ducked in time to avoid being hit in the head by the third man’s pistol butt.

I had my own problems. I let a man coming in from the rear have an elbow smash that must have ruptured his stomach wall. Then I ducked in time to avoid a fist that would have shattered my jaw had it landed. It wasn’t the fist that worried me but the brass knuckles covering the fist. I leaped high, spun and speared “Brass Knuckles” in the throat with a Nukite chop, aiming for his carotid artery and confident that I had smashed it.

I detected from the way the terrorists were beginning to act that they were about to give up the idea of capturing Solomon and me alive. A man pointing a Walther automatic in my direction proved I was right. I jackknifed to one side just as the man pulled the trigger and the Walther boomed like a cannon, vomiting out a 9mm slug. Before the big nosed Syrian could get off a second shot, I dove across the space with a flying drop-kick, my feet like two anvils as they crashed into the man’s chest and face.

But I also saw that more terrorists were joining the fight. Either they had crawled in underneath the rear of the tent or else they had been hidden in that part of the tent that was on the ground. As they rushed us, I could see that Solomon was following up an elbow smash with a straight four-fingered rapier jab aimed at one man’s big belly. The man jumped back and stumbled against me. I snaked my left arm around his neck, pulled hard and hit the back of his head with the palm-heel of my right hand. The man’s neck snapped and he sagged. I spun around and used a Cho uke butterfly block to stop a slashing hand, knocking the man down with a sword-foot kick to his abdomen and finishing him off with a single piercing finger strike to his Adam’s apple.

I glanced at Solomon and surmised that his attackers thought he would be an easy victory because of his average size. He was about five feet ten inches and weighed not more than one hundred sixty-five pounds. How the Israeli fooled them! One Arab rushed in and tried to grab Solomon’s neck. Sol ducked, snatched the hood of the man’s burnoose, jerked down his head and kneed him with such force underneath the chin that the man’s teeth flew out in a spray of blood.

As I was preoccupied with the three terrorists in front of me, yet another jumped me from the rear. He applied a full nelson to my neck and shoulders and jammed his knee into the small of my back, the quick action pushing my midsection forward.

“Smash him in the stomach, Ghazi!” the man holding me cried out. “I have the dog!”

An evil-faced man in front of me, grinned, showed his blackened teeth and charged in. I grinned back and made his eyes roll in his head with a high snap-kick that caved in his face. Blood flowing out of his mouth, he sank to his knees, making himself a perfect target for my foot which crashed against his forehead and drove the frontal bones of his skull into his brain.

Arching upward as much as I could, I hooked my feet behind my captor’s ankles and jerked. The man’s feet flew out from under him and he fell backward, trying to let go of me in order to catch himself. He failed. He crashed to the ground on his back. I fell on top of him.

I bounced to my feet and noticed from the corner of my eye that Solomon had jerked a thick-bladed Syrian knife from a felled terrorist and was slashing left and right, a look of maniacal rage on his dirty face.

My ex-captor was now trying desperately to get to his feet. He intended to make a full turnover, then scramble backward away from me. He never got the chance. In a flash, when he was halfway through the roll, I jumped on his back, reached down, grabbed both his legs by the ankles and pulled violently, up and backward. I heard a loud cracking sound and a scream cut short. The man’s spine had snapped.

I jumped to my feet in time to avoid a straight left fist jab thrown by a huge bearded man who had a face like a bull and was snorting in rage and hate. I ducked, grabbed the man’s wrist and flipped him upside down and over, while still retaining my hold on his arm.

He tried to pull back, but I jerked him to his feet, slammed him in the bridge of the nose, then slipped an arm through the V of his legs and threw him headlong into another terrorist who was trying to draw a pistol from a holster on his hip. Both men went down in a tangle of arms, legs and curses, falling to the side of another man who had stumbled and was now attempting to pull a Magnum revolver from a shoulder holster.

Knowing I had to move fast or die, I streaked across the short distance to the three men. The one with the Magnum was my first concern. I kicked him hard in the forearm, hoping I had broken the bone. He howled and tried to draw back. I slammed my heel into his forehead at the same time that the other man, who had been drawing an automatic, succeeded in pulling the pistol from its holster and managed to twist it upward toward me. I jumped sideways, he pulled the trigger and the bullet struck another Syrian who had been trying to come in at Solomon from the left. I leaped forward, kicked the pistol from the man and mashed in his face with my heel.

Too late I realized that I had been careless; I felt a silken sash fall over the front of my head and slide over my throat. For a moment, panic exploded in my brain. Whoever had crept up behind me put a knee into the small of my back and started to tighten the sash. I kicked backward, my right heel slamming into the side of the man’s left kneecap. The Arab guerrilla yelled in pain, relaxed his crossover stranglehold and reflexively dropped his knee from my back, his movements enabling me to step back closer to him. I was about to give him a terrible elbow jab when he gasped, arched forward and fell on his face. Solomon had thrown the Ghizu, the blade buried in the man’s back to the hilt.

There were still a few men left, but Solomon and I didn’t get the chance to tangle with them. A submachine gun roared from the front opening of the — tent and the remaining terrorists dropped one by one.

Lev Wymann stood in the entrance, smoke curling from the muzzle of an SFR-10 Israeli Galil in his hands. “I sort of figured that the two of you might need some help.” He looked around at the bodies on the ground. “But from the looks of things, I guess you were doing all right on your own.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” Solomon panted. “We couldn’t have lasted much longer.” He looked at me. “That bastard Karameh figured we’d come here. It was a neat trap. But I wonder where he is?”

I moved to one side, my eyes searching for the table and the chest.

“What are you looking for, Carter?” Wymann asked.

“A couple of good friends of mine!”

The two Israelis glanced at each other.

“Not among the Syrians, surely!” exclaimed Solomon.

I soon found the chest, lying on its side. I knelt down, put it upright and opened the rounded lid. There was Wilhelmina and Hugo. I shoved Wilhelmina into her holster on my hip and strapped Hugo to the inside of my right forearm.

Lev Wymann smiled. “Some ‘friends!’” he said with a laugh.

“You’d better believe it,” I said. I stepped toward the entrance. “Let’s get back to the tank. I have a hunch that the Hawk and his lieutenants are hiding where they think we’d never dream of looking.”

“Where’s that?” Wymann asked.

“The tower ruins.”

Chapter Twelve

Once the three of us were outside the tent, we saw that Cham Elovitz had opened the hatch above his head and was standing up and looking at us.

“It’s about time,” he said, his eyes going to me. “If the SLA had killed you and Ben, we were going to run over the tent and flatten them like pancakes. What’s our next move?”

“The Tower ruins,” I said. “I think that’s where the Hawk is hiding. There isn’t any place else he could be, unless he’s somewhere among the bodies.”

Solomon, Wymann and I climbed the rear glacis plate deck and entered the T-54 through the commander’s cupola hatch.

The tank rolled across the wreckage and headed for the Tower of Lions. Through the wide-angle periscope, I stared at the monstrous pile of stones, the structure looking even more forbidding in the deep twilight.

I didn’t expect what happened next. I don’t think any of us did.

A BTR-40 personnel carrier seemed to jump out at full throttle from behind the north side of the ruins, its engine roaring. I estimated its speed at roughly forty m.p.h. Right behind it came an L-59 Gronshiv armored car, the gunner rotating the forward turret and its 50mm cannon toward us.

Mohammed Karameh!

“Carter! Do you see them!” shouted Solomon, who was watching through the commander’s scope. “Blast that carrier! Blast it!”

I lowered the 140mm gun, my fingers slippery on the handle of the wheel, and pressed down on the right pedal, rotating the turret slightly. There was a loud crash from the front of the tank. The armored car had sent a 50mm shell at us. The enemy gunner knew he couldn’t hurt us because of the T-54’s massive armor plate, but I assumed he was trying to distract us just enough to give the Hawk time to escape.

My ears ringing, I turned the calibration knob and double-checked the reticle pattern. I pressed the firing button and the 140mm gun thundered. Several hundred feet ahead, there was a big bang and the gray vehicle turned into a brief but violent burst of red and orange, the explosion sending huge chunks of the car flying out in all directions.

“Damn it, Carter!” Solomon yelled in disgust. “You should have aimed at the carrier!”

I swung the turret to the right while Lev Wymann jerked out the used shell casing, shoved another AP shell into the gun, closed the breech and locked the cam-lever.

I was too late. By the time I started to zero in the gun, the personnel carrier had raced behind a low mound of granite.

Risenberg’s deep voice, coming from the driver’s compartment, was full of puzzlement. “Carter, why in hell didn’t you fire that round at the carrier? Karameh wouldn’t be in an armored car! He knows we’d try to destroy the car first because of its fifty mil gun.”

“Turn us around and get us to one of the personnel carriers,” I said. “We’re ditching the tank. I didn’t fire at the carrier because I knew that if I missed, I wouldn’t have a chance to fire at the armored car. It would have moved behind the ridge before I could have smacked it. We—”

“The hell with the armored car!” Risenberg cut in angrily. “We’ve lost the Hawk. He’s the one we want dead.”

“Shut up and think for a moment,” I snapped. “The main road out of camp is to the north. Karameh and his people took the narrow road to the east. I don’t know what he has in mind, but this tank can’t outrun a personnel carrier. We’ve got to use a carrier. I didn’t want that armored car and its fifty millimeter job banging away at us in a carrier. We wouldn’t have had a chance.”

“On that basis, I suppose you’re right.” Risenberg’s voice had softened. “But how do you propose we find Karameh — take the same route he’s taken?”

“It’s the only way, and the sooner you get us to one of the carriers that’s left, the sooner we can catch him.”

Risenberg spun the tank on its axis and headed it back to the two personnel carriers, the only vehicles left. I thought of Mohammed Karameh, admiring his cautiousness. He had hidden an armored car and a carrier in the ruins for just such an emergency as this. We had no assurance that we could catch up with him. I was counting on his carrier containing a full load, at least twenty people. There were only five of us. With less weight, our carrier would have the edge on speed.

“What about this tank?” Lev Wymann asked. “Are we just going to leave it?”

“We’ll blow it up,” I said, “as soon as we’re sure we have enough gas in the carrier to get to Jordan.”

Risenberg stopped the T-54 and the five of us got out. While Joe and I inspected one of the carriers, the other men, pistols drawn, gathered weapons and ammo belts from the various corpses on the ground. We found that the personnel carrier had a tank full of gas. There were also two jerrycans of gas in the storage compartment underneath one of the metal benches that was bolted to the inner side of the armored wall. The tripod, bolted to the flat section of the rear of the sloping cab, held a Czechoslovakian ZB30 light machine gun, the two box magazines full of 7.92mm cartridges. There were nine more boxes of ammo in the second storage compartment underneath the second bench in the rear.

Risenberg and I yelled for the others to get back and soon they had piled in the rear behind the driver’s compartment, bringing with them a variety of weapons, including a Soviet AKM assault rifle, a Belgian CAL machine gun, a Franchi L557 sub-gun and a Vietnamese MAT 19 submachine gun. Ben Solomon even had two sacks of Chinese stick grenades.

“Now we get rid of the tank,” I said. I turned and looked through the open oval hatch between the driver’s compartment and the rear of the carrier. “Two of you get out and lob several grenades through the commander’s hatch. We’ll move ahead a hundred feet.”

Elovitz and Wymann jumped from the rear of the carrier and moved to the tank. Risenberg moved the carrier forward. Seconds later we heard muffled roars from inside the tank. The two men were back inside the carrier and we were roaring ahead when the heat from the fire reached the 140mm shells and the T-54 blew itself apart.

“We’ve only a fifty-fifty chance of catching up with Karameh,” Risenberg said grimly. “I suppose it depends where he’s headed and how many people are weighing down his vehicle. Have you stopped to think that he might have another tank hidden up there?”

“I’ve considered the possibility,” I said. “All we can do right now is play out the hand we’ve been dealt. If you have a better suggestion, I’d like to hear it.”

“I wish I did.”

Turning east, we took the same route that the Hawk and his people had taken, the eight solid rubber tires of the personnel carrier bouncing over small stones. To either side of us mounds of piled slab rock grew larger the further east we moved on the partially man-made road.

Bouncing up-and-down in the bucket seat, I considered all the possibilities, predicated on the premise that Mohammed Karameh was a very intelligent man. Either this trail was a shortcut leading out of the As-Suwayda hills, or else Karameh had some kind of hidden base in one of the numerous caves. But I doubted it. Whatever he had in mind concerned us. It had to be another trap.

Where the road was more or less level, Risenberg pushed down hard on the gas, speeding up the vehicle to maximum, almost 52.7 mph. We didn’t have any trouble seeing ahead through the 5" X 16" driving slits. However, we had closed the square hatch covers above our heads. With them open, it would be too easy for a hidden sniper to zero down on us. For the same reason, the three men in the rear were crouched down.

Gradually the trail wound into a large arroyo; the stones underneath the tires became bigger which turned our forward movement into a series of up-and-down vibrations. To the left and right loomed granite and sandstone walls which formed, in places, a partnership with black Vishnu schist — crystalline rock having a foliated structure and lying in sheets. Here and there were red spider-web formations caused by iron oxide that had washed down from shale during the rainy season. Looking at all this barrenness, I became doubly determined to find the Hawk. As for Miriam Kamel, I had very special plans for her. Which reminded me of Risenberg...

“How did you know that Miriam Kamel had lied about the tower containing arms and ammunition?” Risenberg gave me a quick, surprised glance. “What’s the difference? We know she lied.”

“I have a thing about knowing the full score, and when two and two add up to five, I get nervous.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I think you’re more than an Israeli tankman,” I said. “I think you’re a Hamosad agent. If you are, maybe you have information that would help me. Let’s be practical. Our goal is the same: to smash the Syrian Liberation Army and either kill or capture Mohammed Karameh. Once he’s dead-meat, the entire organization will fall apart.”

Risenberg slowed the Prime Mover and shifted into low. “Would it ease your mind if I told you that Khalil Marras is working for SCID?”

“The Syrian Counterintelligence Department,” I mused. I was confident now that in his way he was admitting to being a member of Israeli intelligence without actually putting it into words. “Does Karameh know about Marras?”

“I don’t even know if he suspects. If he does, there isn’t anything he can do about it. Karameh couldn’t operate without the approval of the Syrian government. Marras is around to keep an eye on operations and keep Damascus informed. How about you, Carter? I have a feeling that AXE und Hamosad are working together on this operation. Does AXE have any information on KGB involvement with the SLA?”

I smiled inwardly. Risenberg was with Hamosad. No doubt about it. Just the same I said innocently, “What makes you think I’m with AXE?”

He laughed. “The same reason you think I’m with Hamosad. And you’re not exactly unknown in the world of intelligence, Carter. At least by name.”

“We don’t think the Russians are involved directly,” I said. “Anything the Kremlin is doing it’s doing through the Syrian government. The KGB would have a fit if they knew what the Hawk is trying to do.”

Quickly I told Risenberg about the liquified natural gas plot, watching his eyes widen as I talked.

“It’s diabolical,” he said after I had finished. “But it’s typical of Karameh. You know what it adds up to as far as you’re concerned: He has to kill you.”

“Which leads me to believe we could be driving into another trap.” I thought about the two men we had left behind, who had been blown into eternity in the stone prison building.

“What about the two Israelis we left behind?” I asked. “Were they with you and the others when the SLA grabbed you?”

“No. And they weren’t Hamosad either. They couldn’t tell Karameh anything because they didn’t know anything to tell. Karameh didn’t believe them.” For a few moments Risenberg was silent, then he said, “I don’t know about you, Carter. But I have a feeling we’re not going to get out of this alive.”

“We’re not turning back,” I was firm.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” he said quickly. “I don’t mind dying. I just want to make sure the Hawk goes a few minutes before me.”

The road — more precisely the bottom of the arroyo — turned to the southeast, and Risenberg and I became positive in our conviction that Karameh and the people with him were not taking a shortcut to the main road. We had to be driving into a trap.

Around the bend the road stretched straight out for several miles, a ribbon of wasteland that turned due south, to our right. The twilight had become a memory and there would have been complete darkness if not for the full moon.

We noticed, too, that there was no longer an arroyo. While there were immense slabs of granite and basalt and riffles of limestone, polished like marble, to our left, to the right there was only a long slope of hummocky sandstone.

“Take a look to the right,” I said to Risenberg. “Does that slope give you any ideas?”

“What have you got in mind, Carter?”

“How far ahead of us would you say Karameh is?”

“Three or four miles. He had to go through the same stuff as us.”

“I’m thinking that we can drive up and across the slope,” I said. “With a bit of luck we might come out in front of Karameh, or right behind him.”

Risenberg thrust out his chin. “We’d be taking a chance, Carter. For all we know, there might be a precipice on the opposite side. We could even get in a spot where we couldn’t turn around. Then what?”

“I say it’s worth a try,” I said stubbornly. “The carrier has a four-wheel drive, and the slope’s not all that steep.”

“I say we’re both nuts, but I’ve got to agree. It’s a move the Hawk won’t expect and it might give us the lead. Tell the others.”

I turned in my seat toward the open hatch between the driver’s section and the rear of the carrier. “Hang on back there,” I yelled. “We’re going up the slope.”

Risenberg stopped the personnel carrier, shifted gears and backed away from the slope as far as he could. He shifted gears again and headed toward the slope, then jammed down on the gas and the enormous vehicle headed upward, the engine laboring from the effort, the huge tires grinding against the rough surface of the rock. The armored vehicle bounced and, at times, dipped; it would then rise and drop again, or we would find ourselves tilted either to the left or right, at times dangerously so. Finally, however, we were over the top and on the summit.

Risenberg turned off the engine and we stared ahead. In back, Cham Elovitz called out, “Damn it! How much more of this are we going to have to go through?”

In the bright moonlight we saw that we were confronted with about two miles of rough terrain, with a monstrous natural terrace on which were hills of various sizes and shapes. The area was truly a Brobdingnagian garden of sculptures shaped by centuries of wind; bathed in the white brilliance of the moon, it was eerie. And though I wanted Mohammed Karameh for professional reasons and Miriam Kamel for personal ones, I didn’t want us to get trapped up here by the rocks. The personnel carrier was our only means of escape to Jordan.

“The moon is plenty bright,” I said, “but do you think we can go ahead without turning on the lights.”

“With our lights on, they could spot the beams a long time before they could hear the engine,” Risenberg said. “Anyhow, there’s more than enough moonlight.”

“I had to give Risenberg credit; he was one hell of a driver. Carefully and expertly he moved the carrier through the rocks, shifting gears almost constantly... fighting the wheel... his feet overworking on clutch and gas pedals. At times he had to slow down almost to a full stop; at no time could he move faster than fifteen mph. A roller coaster ride was mild compared to the ups-and-downs the carrier made, its huge springs groaning. Half a dozen times one of the front wheels would slide into a hollowed depression or a large crack and Risenberg would have to gun the engine to free the rubber screaming against bare granite or rock coated with marl. At other times he crashed the big towing hook directly into toadstool-shaped structures of tufa stone, none over five feet high, crumbling them as though they had been made of talc.

Ultimately we neared the end of the highplain, this evident when we saw the rim in the distance and, beyond the rim, empty space. Cautiously, Risenberg brought the carrier to a full stop, fifty feet from the edge. He and I then got out, hurried to the edge and looked down. The three men in back jumped down and came to the edge, the five of us relieved to find that we were staring down a slope, yet one that angled very steeply.

I had guessed correctly. By cutting across the hill instead of going around on the road, we had caught up with Mohammed Bashir Karameh. His personnel carrier, moving straight south, was only half a mile away.

“Can we get down there?” Lev Wymann asked. “The slope looks damned steep to me!”

Risenberg clapped him on the back. “Don’t worry, Lev. If we don’t make it, you’ll know it when we start sliding and the carrier comes crashing down on top of us.”

We got back inside the carrier and Risenberg started the engine. He drove the carrier slowly to the edge, gave the engine a bit more gas and shifted gears. The front wheels kept rolling straight ahead until they were over the edge and the carrier was being pushed ahead only by its rear wheels. At the very last second, Risenberg shifted into neutral. The carrier stopped moving, five feet of the driver’s compartment sticking straight out over the edge.

“Here we go, Carter!”

Risenberg shifted gears again. The front section of the cab dropped. The wheels touched ground. The personnel carrier began to go down the slope. I glanced at Risenberg. His face was one big mask of strain.

Down the slope we went. There was always the danger that, as the vehicle picked up speed, Risenberg wouldn’t be able to dodge a large rock, in which case we might turn over or, worse, lose one of the front wheels.

Faster and faster we went, the carrier’s own thirty-five tons increasing its momentum. It didn’t take long before we realized that our downhill plunge was right on the verge of being out of control, that the carrier was moving as much from its own momentum as from the power of its engine. I got the feeling that Wymann might very well feel the carrier coming down on us.

Risenberg shut off the engine and applied the brakes. For several moments the carrier slowed. Then it resumed its former speed, the tires screaming in protest.

“Try the emergency,” I suggested. “We’re at least another hundred feet from the bottom.”

Risenberg used the emergency brake, but quickly pushed the lever forward, disengaging it, when the rear end of the carrier started to swing around.

Bouncing up-and-down in the seat, I leaned forward, stared through the vision slit and watched the rough ground moving faster and faster toward us. I glanced at Risenberg, who was cursing in Hebrew. It was all he could do to control the front wheels and to keep the big vehicle from turning over or the rear end from swinging around. If that happened, we’d turn over and keep rolling until we reached the bottom.

Assuming we would reach the road, we would then have the problem of keeping the front end of the carrier from slamming into the rock face of the opposite wall. We were moving downward at almost fifty mph and such a crash would crumple the front end and render the carrier useless — and us with it! The only thing Risenberg could do was apply the emergency brake at the right moment. And that is what he did.

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 wash tub, 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 washtubsized 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.

Chapter Thirteen

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.

“Then what’s the point?” Risenberg asked.

“There’s a tiny bomb in here. It’s—”

“A bomb!” Wymann cut me off. “A bomb that size couldn’t be more than a giant firecracker.”

“Shut up and listen,” I growled. “This isn’t an explosive device. It’s compressed hydrochlorsarsomasine, a very potent nerve gas that kills within seconds.”

The Israelis looked disbelievingly at me. “So you get to the side of the cave and manage to toss the gas inside,” Risenberg said. “One sniff and we’re dead, too!”

“I think that some of the SLA will remain at this end while others go back for the carrier,” I said. “The gas can’t affect me. Before I left Tel Aviv, I was injected with a two-week long lasting antidote, a combination of atropine and tetrathiazide.”

“That’s just dandy!” Solomon’s voice was next to venomous, but he didn’t turn away from the Czech light machine gun. “What about the man who goes with you? What about the rest of us in the carrier?”

“The gas has a short life of only ten seconds,” I explained. “The breeze is blowing away from us. The men in the carrier won’t be harmed. But within the confines of a cave, with men grouped together just inside the entrance, they’d die within half a short breath.”

I held up my hand for silence, seeing that Wymann was getting ready to interrupt again. “Whoever goes with me wouldn’t stay by the side of the cave. He’d be forty feet up the slope before I tossed in the gas. I’d join him and we’d go across the top and drop grenades on the carrier. The rest we’d have to play by ear.”

The four Israelis were skeptical of the plan. Down on his haunches, Wymann said, “What makes you think we can climb the side, get across the top and lob grenades into the carrier before Karameh reaches it? He’s not exactly turtle-slow about such things.”

“The fact that we beat him here tells me that the tunnel is a series of long twists and turns,” I said.

“Yes, but they were on foot,” Risenberg said. “We rode.”

“Yet they were a thousand feet ahead of us,” I said. “It’s all academic. As I see it, our best bet right now is Pierre. Then we go across the top and attack.”

I picked up a sack of stick grenades and put the strap over my shoulder. “Who wants to play hero with me?”

Risenberg picked up the Belgian CAL submachine gun and a long pouch of spare magazines. “I might as well tag along with you, Carter. I’d rather be on the move than sit here and wonder what was happening.”

When I saw the pouch of eight extra magazines for the MP43, I strapped the pouch to my cartridge belt and picked up a West German Sturm Gewehr assault rifle. The StG was a superior weapon, not only because it was unlikely to jam, but because its long magazine held fifty-four 7.92 millimeter cartridges and could be fired either on full or semi-automatic.

I said to Solomon, “When you hear me give the world, rake both sides, but not more than a foot to either side. We’ll go to the right of the front of the carrier. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Solomon said.

I glanced briefly at Risenberg; then, hunched over, I moved to the rear of the carrier. Risenberg moved behind me, carrying the CAL chatter box.

My hand was on the latch to the hatch in the rear of the carrier when Cham Elovitz said matter-of-factly, “Count me in, too. Three can do a better job than two. Ben and Lev can handle things here.”

“We can hold them,” Lev Wymann said, “but sooner or later the gun will run out of ammunition. If the three of you haven’t done your job by then, Ben and I won’t be around to see the sunrise.”

“The SLA on this side will be dead in less than ten minutes,” I said. I shoved open the perpendicular hatch, eased myself through the opening, dropped to the ground and slung the StG across my back by its sling-strap.

I took out tiny Pierre, pulled the small red tab and very carefully returned him to his container. Now, any severe jar would cause the little devil to pop and release the deadly nerve gas.

Elovitz and Risenberg, who had crawled out behind me, watched with fascination, each man holding an automatic weapon. In addition to the two submachine guns, each man had a Russian Stechkin machine pistol in his belt.

“Any time you’re ready, Carter,” Risenberg said.

“Remember, to the right. Move to the right,” I reminded him and Elovitz. “Keep nine or ten feet away from me. When you reach the slope, start climbing. I’ll catch up.”

Both men nodded. I called out, “Get the show on the road, Solomon.”

Instantly the light machine gun began throwing out slugs, each 7.92mm projectile a tiny rocket of death that hit the granite around the mouth of the cave’s opening which was wide but low.

The three of us moved out from behind the rear end of the personnel carrier, I slightly in the lead, Risenberg and Elovitz to my right. Legs pumping, I shot straight across the moonlit space, my two companions racing at an angle that, by the time the three of us reached the face of the rock, would put them twenty feet to the right of me.

All the while the ZB30 roared, the rim of the entrance ahead screaming with ricochets. Darting to a point that would put me eight feet from the right side of the entrance, I hoped Solomon would stop firing the moment I reached the rock.

I doubt if the wild sprint took more than fifteen seconds. Suddenly I was against rough rock, panting, and the cave entrance was only seven to eight feet to the side of me. I pulled Wilhelmina from her holster, switching off the safety lever, then put my left hand into my pocket and let Pierre roll from the tube into my palm. A short distance behind me, I could hear Risenberg and Elovitz climbing up the slope, loose rocks tumbling beneath their feet.

I moved closer. Solomon had stopped chipping each side with slugs, but now and then he sent a three and four round burst directly into the mouth of the cave. Several feet from the right edge of the cave, I flipped Pierre around the rock and through the black opening. He must have soared twenty-five feet before falling and striking the ground. I heard the faint pop and knew that Pierre was spewing out the deadly nerve gas. Strangely, I didn’t hear any sounds of panic, not a single gasp.

Was it possible that we had been tricked, that all of the SLA terrorists had already departed for the other entrance and at this very moment might be getting into their carrier?

Frustrated because I didn’t dare poke my head into the cave, I moved ten feet to the right and began to climb the slope.

My only concern at the moment was that if I got smeared with slugs, I might die before I could take Mohammed Karameh with me.

Him and Miriam Kamel...

Chapter Fourteen

With the hot northeasterly wind blowing against us, Elovitz, Risenberg, and I moved across the top of the ridge. The route was a chaotic mess of loose ground rock and grotesquely shaped sandstone structures sculptured by windblown sand. The surface itself resembled some Normandy battlefield, the terrain a patchwork of ruts, crooked channels and ribbed craters. But a personnel carrier could cross the top at this point. Ten to twelve yards to our right it was possible to drive a large vehicle forward by moving it carefully between boulders and enormous masses of granite, slabs arranged into natural stepping stones.

Another danger we had to face was the possibility that Karameh, if he and his people were returning to their carrier, might have anticipated our strategy and sent scouts ahead on foot. Consequently, the three of us proceeded with the utmost caution. We watched each big rock, our eyes probing the black shadows, our ears tuned to the slightest noise.

“You can’t be sure that your gas bomb got any of them?” Risenberg asked again. “No sounds of strangling, nothing?”

“Five minutes from now my answer will be the same,” I replied. “No, I didn’t hear anything. I—”

I jerked up short, cocked my head to one side and held up my hand for silence. Elovitz and Risenberg stopped, a frozen expression on their faces.

We could hear the faint sound of an engine up ahead, the noise growing louder with each second. Karameh had reached his personnel carrier and, judging from the deep throbbing of the engine, the armored vehicle was slowly moving up the slope. We couldn’t be positive, but we estimated the top of the slope to be three hundred and fifty feet ahead. From the sound of the engine, the carrier would come over the edge at about a hundred feet to our right.

“I think we have a big problem!” Risenberg muttered. When he saw that neither Elovitz or I was amused at his attempt at humor, he added coldly, “We’ll have to gauge the route of the carrier and plan accordingly.”

“God help us,” Elovitz muttered resignedly.

I swung to the right. “Come on. We have to move in a hurry.”

“Where?” asked Elovitz.

I didn’t bother to answer. We hurried past boulders, jumped over crooked cracks and ran around the side of craters, at times stumbling on loose gravel. When the sound of the engine was immediately in front of us, we stopped and looked around. Other than boulders, there were monumental basalt and granite slabs all tumbled into each other, some forming tremendous stepping-stones to a height of thirty feet. Between these structures there was ample space for a carrier to proceed forward, the ground itself being fairly level.

Elovitz and Risenberg turned and looked at me, their stares asking, Now what?

“I’ll get up on the rocks to the left,” I told them. “The two of you take the right side. Hopefully the carrier will pass between us. I’ll lob down grenades. You two machine gun anyone who might escape the grenades.”

Elovitz came right to the point. “What about the scouts? Al-Huriya would be a moron not to have four or five men on recon ahead of the carrier.”

Risenberg thrust in, his voice sharp, “We don’t dare let the scouts get behind us. If we get sandwiched between them and the carrier, we’ll have had it.”

“Yeah, and there’ll be a man on the machine gun on the cab,” Elovitz said. “I wasn’t sure, but it looked like a SDhK job.”

“In that case, you two take care of the scouts and the man on the DShK,” I said. “I’ll use grenades against the carrier. Four or five of them should blow off one of the front wheels.”

Risenberg sighed. “Yes, if our luck holds.”

In position, the three of us waited. I lay flat to one side of a chunk of jagged-edged granite. Forty feet away from me, across the gap, Elovitz and Risenberg were concealed in boulders at the top of an enormous pile of stepping-stones. In the bright white moonlight we could see everything clearly.

We waited. We watched. We stared ahead in the direction of the engine noise. The driver of the carrier would logically take the path that offered the least difficulty. And the route below, between me and the two Israelis, was the only passable course at this end of the ridge.

I blinked. Had I seen a figure dash into the deep shadow of a rock a few hundred feet ahead? I wasn’t sure. I stared at the shadow, not even daring to blink. I had been right the first time. A figure darted from the inky blackness and ran to the side of another rock, a man carrying either a, submachine gun or an assault rifle. I hoped that Elovitz and Risenberg had also spotted the lone enemy.

Ten feet behind the first SLA guerrilla, I spotted two more men, their white kaffiyehs stark in the moonlight. Behind the first three terrorists came a fourth and a fifth, the last gunman hard to follow because he was wearing the dark robe of a Syrian Bedouin.

I watched the five Arabs run from rock to rock, their weapons at hip level. Suddenly the carrier loomed seventy-five to eighty feet behind them, its lights turned off. Right away I saw that my two friends and I were in trouble. If we waited until the carrier was close enough, the scouts would be behind us and we wouldn’t be able to see them.

There was no way for me to contact Elovitz and Risenberg. I could only hope that they would spray the scouts with slugs at the very last moment and that when they did, the carrier would be close enough for me to use a makeshift explosive pack.

Glancing every now and then at the approaching scouts, I took three grenades from the bag on my shoulder and clipped them to my cartridge belt. I then proceeded to wrap the canvas tightly around the remaining eight grenades in the big, cut the strap in two on a sharp edge of a rock and tied the two lengths securely around the bulky package, leaving a foot of one strap dangle. The package was ready. I hoped to God that Risenberg and Elovitz were.

I picked up my German assault rifle and pushed the selector to automatic fire. Twenty feet below and in front of me was the first of the scouts, the Arab gunsel taking the point. Damn it, I thought. When the scouts stopped slugs, the personnel carrier would be one hundred feet out front. That was one helluva long distance. But there wasn’t any other way. My high swing would have to carry the package of grenades close enough to get the job done. If not...

I couldn’t wait any longer. I caught the first scout in my sights and my finger moved closer to the trigger. Elovitz, Risenberg and I could have been mentally wired on the same circuit because the instant my StG assault rifle shattered the stillness, their machine guns started to roar.

The Syrian who had taken the point was ripped apart by my dead center burst of 7.92mm slugs, the impact knocking him back a dozen feet before he sagged to the ground. The Israelis proved that they were old pros in the ways of a firefight. They ignored the first scout, assuming I had seen him, and directed their shots at the other four. I heard short cries of pain and deduced that the Israelis’ slugs had killed the two Syrians I had lost in the shadows. My own muzzle flashed fire as I raked the darkness to the left of the rock. One of the two men must have moved because he fired back. A dozen high impact projectiles screamed all around me, one striking so close that several chips of rock struck me on the right cheek. I returned the fire during the man’s lag time between bursts, the flashing from his own muzzle, etched in my memory, serving as my target. A very short shriek informed me that I hadn’t missed.

Now Karameh and his people got into action. I waited for two or three seconds to make sure that Elovitz and Risenberg would do their job. They did! A terrorist stepped up on the gun platform of the carrier, tried to swing the armored shield into place and was instantly slammed into the next world by a stream of slugs from either Elovitz or Risenberg.

Another chain of projectiles raked across the front of the driver’s compartment, the numerous ricochets sounding almost like some kind of animal screaming in pain. The two Israelis were taking no chances that any enemy might fire through the two vision slots of the compartment.

It was now or never. I picked up the package of grenades by the strap, stood up, measured the distance and threw the bundle as hard as I could, watching it arc in the moonlight as I dropped back to the ground and picked up my rifle.

The package hit the rocks six feet to one side of the vehicle, toward the front. I didn’t hesitate. I fired a short burst into the canvas bundle and the eight grenades exploded with an earthshaking roar. A flash of flame, the sound of last minute shrapnel hitting ground, and it was all over. I stared at the carrier through the clearing smoke while Risenberg and Elovitz flooded the front of the cab with another wave of slugs, killing two more terrorists.

I sighed with relief; the eight grenades had done their job. The explosion had wrecked the carrier’s left front wheel, twisting it on its mounting so that the vehicle was tilted heavily to the left. It would never move again. Neither would I or the two Israelis if we didn’t change positions and get off the rocks. Elovitz and Risenberg had to take time to reload, which enabled two Syrians to reach the machine gun mounted to the rear roof of the cab, one pulling down the shield, the other grabbing the guide handle.

Just before the man opened fire, I wriggled back from the edge of the slab and saw that the guerrillas had piled out of the rear hatchway and were running to the rocks from both the left and the right sides. I felt a knot grow in the pit of my stomach. How could there be that many of the enemy in the carrier? Only one answer made sense: Pierre had not killed anyone. There hadn’t been any guerillas in the mouth of the cave; they had all gone back to the carrier with Karameh. Furthermore, there wasn’t any way to tell how many there were down below. If they had doubled up in the carrier, we could be facing as many as thirty-five or forty.

After shoving a full magazine into the StG assault rifle, I slid all the way back from the rock and began my descent to level ground. As I reached the bottom, I started to dodge and weave to my right. My present goal was to link up with Elovitz and Risenberg so that the three of us could form an internal sphere of defense. I heard the snarling of submachines sixty feet to the north of me — the two Israelis. There was more roaring in a wide arc to the west — the damned SLA.

They had spotted me! A bullet cut through my pants at the rear of my left thigh but it barely grazed the flesh. Another slug cut over the top of my head, jerking my hair in its hot passage. A third projectile tugged at the back of my collar, hit a rock several feet to one side of me and ricocheted off, missing my right cheek by only inches.

I dove into a small crater and slithered across on my belly, ending up twenty feet to the right of my original position.

High velocity projectiles splattered against the two chunks of granite, that were my cover, the advancing gunmen thinking they had me pinned down. I peeked out from behind the rock and saw six or seven of them running to one side, then to the other, pausing now and then to trigger off short bursts. I twisted my mouth into a smile. They were running straight into their own open air funerals.

Thrusting the barrel of the StG over the top of a rock, I fired in a swinging back and forth motion. Caught with their caution down, the terrorists didn’t have time to turn their weapons toward me. My stream of swaged slugs ripped into them, the hollow-pointed lead tearing off tiny patches of cloth, then striking flesh. One of my slugs struck a grenade hanging on a man’s chest, and he exploded.

Trusting that Risenberg and Elovitz were holding the area to the north, I took two of the stick grenades from my belt, pulled the pin from one and threw it west of me. I flung the second grenade twenty feet to the right of the first explosion, and again dropped flat, listening to the sound of stray shrapnel striking the granite. Screams and moans floated back to me from the west. One Syrian, his hands pressed tightly over his mutilated face, staggered toward me. Several other guerrillas, dazed by concussion, weaved drunkenly, not realizing they were totally exposed to my fire.

Now was the time to move. Trying to stay close to the larger boulders of granite, I crawled on my hands and knees for six or seven yards, then jumped up and started running a crooked course to the north. Behind me, several grenades exploded in the vicinity of my previous position, the detonations ringing up and down the ridge.

I spotted Elovitz dodging to my left, thirty feet in front of me, and yelled loudly in Hebrew, “Cham! I’m in front of you.”

I knew I was taking a chance by calling out. Proof came a few moments after I snuggled down into a rounded out depression close to a clearing which was actually the top of a mammoth slab of limestone. I estimated that a hundred enemy slugs stabbed into the rocks around me, the racket of ricochets a crescendo of screeching whines.

I looked for a more secure position, but saw none. There was, however, a ditchlike fissure that ran parallel to me. As far as I could detect in the half-darkness, it changed to a diagonal route ten feet to the south. I edged closer to the large crack in the rock and looked down. I could see by the moonlight striking one side that the ditch was less than five feet deep. Perfect for an escape route. Dropping into the crevice feet first I moved toward the north and hoped that if Risenberg and Elovitz heard me, they wouldn’t shoot before they looked. The sound of feet on loose stone just around a bend in the ditch startled me. I stopped and listened. The noise stopped.

“Carter? Is that you?” Elovitz whispered loudly.

“I’m ahead of you,” I said relieved. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Hold it,” Elovitz ordered. “Give our names.”

I smiled at their common-sense caution. “Josef Risenberg and Cham Elovitz — the two jokers suffering through this with me.”

“Come on,” Risenberg called back with a half-laugh.

I hurried forward, rounded the bend and soon had made contact with the two Israelis, who were as dirty and sweat-soaked as I.

“The two of you took a chance calling out that way,” I admonished. “I could have been the enemy, but I’m glad you did. How many have you neutralized?”

“More than a dozen that we know of,” Risenberg whispered. “The damned fools charged right at us. Fanatics, everyone of them.” He gave a cynical snort. “How about you?”

“At least that many. Have you seen anything of Karameh or the Kamels?”

The two Israelis shook their heads to the negative.

“We didn’t have time to look at faces,” Elovitz said. “I think a few of them were women, but we didn’t check. What’s our next move?”

“We can’t cross the open space without exposing ourselves to enemy gunfire,” I said. “Let’s try to get behind whoever is left and finish them off. And watch out for slugs from the carrier. There still might be someone manning the heavy machine gun.”

We moved along the inside of the ditch for another thirty or forty feet, then stopped and listened, all three of us worried about the silence. What small animals were on the hilltop had been frightened by the gunfire, and the unnatural stillness was unnerving. The SLA had lost us. But neither did we know where they were.

Discreetly I poked my head over the top of the ditch and looked around. On one side, all I saw were rocks of various sizes and shapes. On the other side was a large open area. What would the SLA expect us to do? They knew we wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to cross the open space. They could only guess. They had to realize that we were in the general vicinity. All right. They’d try to encircle us. We had to get behind them before they succeeded.

“Let’s try for those rocks,” I suggested.

The three of us crawled out of the ditch and began to creep along the scattered stones, keeping as low as possible. I pulled up short at the sight of the three bodies ahead, lying to one side of a slab rock.

“Careful,” I whispered. “It could be a trap.”

“I think they’re three of the pigs we killed,” Elovitz whispered. “I recognize the Safari hat one of them is wearing.”

With our weapons pointed downward, we approached the corpses. We soon discovered that one of the bodies was that of a young woman in her early twenties, her dead, dark eyes staring up at the stars. There was a holster around her waist and a Stechkin machine pistol in the bloody leather. I pulled out the gun, stuffed it into my own belt and glanced at Elovitz who was searching the other two bodies while Risenberg kept watch.

Elovitz held up the wrist of one slain terrorist and whispered, “Look, this one is wearing a Seiko chronograph!”

“Take it,” I said. “It may come in handy.”

We continued forward, came to an enormous boulder, and started to edge around it, our hearts pounding with tension. It happened so very quickly that the four Syrians, coming from the other side, were as surprised as we were. The seven of us had practically collided with each other.

I was the first to react; I swung up my StG and fired. The dozen hollow-pointed slugs almost cut the first killer in two, then continued on their way through empty air. Simultaneously, Elovitz and Risenberg leaped to one side and rushed forward to meet the three other SLA members before any of them could throw slugs at us. I heard a scraping sound above me, looked up and saw the surprised face of still another terrorist whose body was sliding toward me, his arms and legs moving frantically as he tried to brake his fall. Apparently he had crawled across the top of the rock and had been getting ready to spray slugs down on top of me when he slipped on the marblelike basalt. I didn’t have time to duck. He came down on top of me, losing his gun, the impact of his fall forcing my own rifle from my hands.

“Dog infidel!” he snarled and, trying to keep me pinned down, pulled a Ghizu from his tangled waistcoat.

I jabbed a thumb into his left eye and somehow managed to get my hand around his wrist, succeeding in keeping the point of the knife away from my throat. Together, we rolled over on our sides, then struggled to our feet. I was worried, but not because the Syrian was half a head taller and outweighed me by fifty pounds. I feared that before we finished with this group, the rest of the terrorists would arrive. The blast from my StG had pinpointed our location.

The big Syrian, much stronger than I, jerked his knife-hand free from my grasp. He attempted a straight inward slash, at the same moment that I stepped back, twisted my wrist free and avoided the blade by sidestepping to the left rear. For a moment, my attacker was confused. A man used to brute force, he couldn’t comprehend the subtler techniques of attack and defense.

As the Ghizu returned to its trajectory, my arms shot out, one going underneath his right elbow joint and pushing upward, the other catching his right wrist and pushing downward with every ounce of strength at my command. The elbow snapped. The man howled but didn’t have time to put up any kind of defense. I followed the scissors break with a right lead leg shin kick and the Syrian fell flat on his face. Immediately I stomped on the back of his neck, breaking it.

Stepping away from the corpse, I spotted Cham Elovitz struggling with two of the enemy, but he didn’t need any help. Cham succeeded in shoving the muzzle of his North Vietnamese MAT underneath one man’s chin and pulled the trigger, the barrel spitting out half a dozen rounds of 7.62mm projectiles. With the dead man sagging, Elovitz used his left hand to stab the second Syrian in the face with the barrel of the MAT. The man screamed in pain, let go of Elovitz’s right arm and stepped back. Elovitz instantly blew him away with a short burst of slugs to the chest, while Risenberg, struggling with yet another terrorist, finished off his opponent by cracking open the side of the man’s head.

As I stooped to pull the StG from underneath my recent victim’s body, my worst fear became cold reality. The other SLA terrorists were coming in from all sides, rushing us so fast I didn’t have time to bother with the German assault rifle nor to pick up the Russian machine gun the terrorist had dropped. My hands dove to my holster; I jerked out the Stechkin and Wilhelmina and started firing. Elovitz and Risenberg, their faces grim and determined, started firing their machine guns, the three of us dodging and weaving back and forth.

But Fate was against us. There were too many of them, and quickly we were encircled. I used my last Stechkin round to kill an SLA sadist who was about to stab Elovitz in the back.

My eyes raking the area, I saw at once that we were confronting the remnants of the enemy force. Mohammed Karameh was with them! I spotted him to the southeast of me, a Soviet PPS-43 submachine gun in his hands. To his right was the fox-faced Ahmed Kamel, the back of his kaffiyeh flowing in the wind. To the left of Karameh — Miriam Kamel! She carried what looked like an AK-47. All three were running toward us. However, they couldn’t fire at me or the Israelis because of the intervening Syrian SLAs.

I still had five cartridges left in Wilhelmina and put one of them into a Syrian’s face at pointblank range. I then tossed the Luger to my left hand, after dropping the Stechkin, and gave a half-twist to my right arm. Hugo jumped from his case and his handle slid into my hand. I jumped to one side to avoid a string of 7.62mm bullets at about the same time that Risenberg slammed a Syrian across the face with the side of a Stechkin machine pistol. Risenberg didn’t slow down. With a short burst he sprayed the two men who rushed him, then spun and fired the AKM at two more SLAs, one of whom was a woman, the flat-nosed projectiles punching the two in the stomach. The man fell back and died without a murmur, but the woman let out a high-pitched scream.

I dove to the side of a slab of granite resembling a tombstone that had sunk to one side, aware that Mohammed Karameh and the two Kamels were only twenty-five feet ahead of me. I reasoned that if I knew they were there, they had to know that I was here. Quickly I shoved Hugo into my belt, reloaded Wilhelmina and forced myself to wait. To be on the safe side, I glanced around me and made another dive a few seconds before the chain of UZI projectiles cut into the side of the tombstone-rock. Slugs zinged off and chips flew. The man who had fired had reared up from behind a chunk of sandstone to my right, almost parallel to my own position. I had seen the man’s face only very briefly and now felt pure hatred flooding up within me. That jet black beard! Those deep-set eyes! That long, crooked nose. The gunman was Khalil Marras, one of Karameh’s top aides.

Hurriedly, I crawled for my life, inching between two long slabs of granite just as Marras reared up again to fire. No doubt he thought he had me cold. It was a fatal mistake on his part.

Marras’ slugs hit only bare rock. From my new position, I pulled Wilhelmina’s trigger in unison with Elovitz who, having somehow gotten hold of an enemy’s Soviet-made PPS43, cut loose with a long burst. My two 9mm bullets hit Marras high in the chest and knocked him back while Elovitz’s stream of slugs stitched Marras in the left side.

I’ll never know whether it was Mohammed Karameh or one of the Kamels who killed Elovitz. All I know is that there was a roaring to the front of me, and to my right, a long burst of slugs that ripped into the Israeli from neck to navel and knocked him backward. He must have died with twenty tunnels bored through his body.

There was a second burst of firing, this blast at Risenberg, who ducked down and let out a yell, a howl of pain. Was he dead or only wounded? I didn’t know. I didn’t dare call out to him.

I was certain that Karameh and Miriam and Ahmed Kamel were ahead of me, hidden down somewhere in the rocks. I strained my eyes in the bright moonlight. Could there by any SLAs hiding behind me? If there were, I didn’t see them. If there were, they didn’t see me, or else they would have fired. Could it be that there were only four of us left alive — just me and Karameh and the two Kamels?

With only Wilhelmina and Hugo left, I began to crawl, following the route along the slab of granite which gradually curved in the general direction of my prey.

Slowly and carefully, so as not to disturb loose gravel, I continued forward another twenty feet, wondering if the other three were moving in the opposite direction. I stopped and listened. I couldn’t be sure, but thought I heard loose rock falling to my right. I glanced behind me. Nothing.

I reared up slightly and looked to the right. Fifteen feet away were Mohammed Karameh, Ahmed Kamel and Miriam Kamel... their backs toward me, all three crawling forward on their hands and knees.

I could have fired from behind the tiny wall of granite. But I didn’t want to take the chance that, during those few seconds, one of them might crawl behind a rock and away from my line of fire. Wilhelmina was very efficient, but she wasn’t a match for the automatic weapons they had.

I jumped up and around the end of the ridge and raised Wilhelmina. Hearing me, the three swung around, alarm flashing all over their faces. I snapped off two shots, aiming at Karameh, who reacted with amazing speed, as did Ahmed Kamel. I knew how their minds were working because, under similar conditions, I would have used the same stay-alive logic. Knowing that they didn’t have time to fire within that slight shave of a second, they jerked to one side. Only Miriam tried to swing around.

Stupidly, she jumped to her feet and tried to level the AK-47 assault rifle at me. I didn’t take time to move Wilhelmina’s muzzle toward her. Instead, I used Hugo in a snap-throw, tossing him by his handle. Miriam screamed, dropped the AK-47, stared at me for a moment, and her two hands fluttered to Hugo’s handle protruding just above her belt buckle. She sank to her knees, then fell backward, her body jerking slightly.

I knew that I couldn’t risk shooting it out with Mohammed Karameh and Ahmed Kamel; not with their having submachine guns. Reacting from pure instinct, I made a long dive for the two men as they jumped up and tried to zero in on me.

Having a slight edge, I used a roundhouse kick against a snarling Ahmed Kamel. My foot connected with the underneath side of his PPS-46 sub-gun and sent it flying backward over his head. With the same quick motion, I pulled Wilhelmina’s trigger, put a 9mm hollow point into Kamel’s chest, and grabbed the long barrel of Karameh’s Soviet PPS-44 submachine gun. Knowing I couldn’t do the job with one hand, I let Wilhelmina fall to the ground and attempted to knee him in the groin.

Very fast for a big man, he arched himself back, evading my knee, and tried to trip me and jerk the barrel of the machine gun from my hand. I put my left hand on the weapon, my fingers closing over the top rib of the steel-frame stock, and kicked him hard.

He let out a half-cry of rage and pain, and for a brief moment we stared at each other. Karameh was no longer the well-groomed leader of the Syrian Liberation Army. His mustache and long sideburns were grimy; his oily black hair looked like a bird’s nest and his cheeks were caked with dried blood from where rock chips had hit. His eyes, very much alive, glowed with the hatred of hell itself.

I was damned worried. He was stronger than I and didn’t seem to be weakening. If anything, his desperation and his hatred of me were giving him extra strength. I didn’t even dream of having the power to literally twist the submachine gun from his hands. My only chance was to use superior know-how — or die.

Karameh gave me the opportunity when he moved his left foot forward slightly.

I had him! Still hanging onto the PPS-44 with both hands, I pivoted slightly until my left side was facing Karameh’s front. I released my hold on the PPS-44, grabbed his right arm and jerked it forward and out, causing him to lean to the right of his line of gravity. Caught unaware, he didn’t have time to jerk his arm back, to try to swing the machine gun toward me.

I lifted my right foot, placed it against his right knee as a fulcrum and again grabbed the submachine gun and pushed it upward to my right, knowing that he wouldn’t dare let go. As he made one last desperate effort to turn the muzzle in my direction, I grabbed his right arm with both hands and completed the throw. With a wild cry of rage and surprise, Karameh went spinning, landing with a thud on his back.

I was behind him as he started to sit up and tried to raise the Russian submachine gun. I was faster. With all my might, I chopped down on both sides of his neck with two sword-hand Shuto cuts. Karameh cried out in excruciating agony and dropped the machine gun, his collar bone broken.

Karameh was as helpless as a brand new baby! I dropped to my knees behind him, threw my left around his throat, placed my right arm on the back of his neck, locked the fingers of my left hand on my right elbow and the fingers of my right hand on the upper muscle of my left arm and began to apply a Chibku strangling clutch. Karameh struggled violently but only for a moment.

Suddenly he went as limp as a piece of wet tissue paper. I released my hold, pushed him forward on his face and stood up. I took one last look at the body, went over to where I had dropped Wilhelmina, picked her up and walked leisurely to where Miriam Karameh was lying on her back, Hugo still sticking out of her stomach. She was conscious.

I got down on one knee, Wilhelmina dangling loosely in my right hand. Miriam’s eyes, shiny mirrors of pain and fear, moved up to me. Her mouth worked but no words came out.

“Your brother’s dead,” I said. “Karameh, too.”

She managed to speak, her words weak, “Nick... I d-don’t want to d-die like this. Help me... I’ll tell you anything you want to know about us.”

“I don’t need to know anything about the SLA. You’re all dead.”

“I... I don’t want to d-die like this, Nick...”

“You’re not going to,” I said and raised Wilhelmina.

Miriam didn’t have time to speak. I pulled the trigger. Wilhelmina roared, and a hole appeared suddenly in the middle of her forehead. Her mouth went slack.

I pulled Hugo from Miriam’s stomach, wiped the sides of the blade carefully on her shirt and shoved him into the sheath on my right arm, then reloaded Wilhelmina.

I looked for Risenberg and found him leaning against a rock, sitting butt-flat on the ground.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“Did we get them?” he countered.

“They’re all dead, including Karameh. I got him, and Miriam and her brother. What about your wound?”

Risenberg struggled to his feet, his right arm hanging limp. “One slug,” he said, gritting his teeth in pain. “My right shoulder. I think the bone’s broken, but the bleeding has stopped.”

I put out a hand to help him but he shook his head.

“We have to climb down the slope,” I said. “Think you can do it?”

“Watch me!”

Together we moved in the direction of the slope. He and I and the two other Israelis had a date with a helicopter.

We’d be in Jordan within an hour...

Chapter Fifteen

I had been wrong about Hawk. He had not remained in Tel Aviv. He had returned to the United States that day after I had been smuggled into Syria. Nine days after the three Israelis and I had escaped into Jordan by helicopter, I was in the hidden complex of rooms within the Amalgamated Press and Wire Services building- on Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., sitting in Hawk’s private office, giving my personal report.

“The SLA is finished,” I concluded my report. “The splinter groups in various Mid-East cities will try to form another central organization, but they’ll not succeed. There’ll be some shoot-outs, but that’s all it will amount to.”

I leaned back in the deep armchair and crossed my legs, my eyes wandering to Hawk’s collection of miniature porcelain eagles in a glass case on one side of the room.

“Yes, I agree, Carter.” He leaned forward and picked up the half-smoked cigar from the ashtray on his desk and studied it for a moment. “They’re still dangers. You know what they are.” He looked sternly at me, his shaggy eyebrows forming a big V. “The people involved in the LNG operation might try to pull it off to get even with us for killing Karameh. Why didn’t you try to capture him?”

“Sir,” I said stiffly, “at the time I was having some difficulty just staying alive.”

“I guess it was rough.” Hawk’s voice softened somewhat and his attitude became more friendly. “But you got out in one piece. That’s all that really matters.”

I said, “I assume that AXE has set up the necessary machinery to inspect all incoming supertankers from Libya before they’re allowed to enter any American port — and more that you can’t tell me about?”

Hawk moved his lips back over his teeth in his version of a smile.

“I’ll tell you this, Carter. The possibility of any exploding gas cloud is now zero,” he growled. “Do you have any more to add?”

“No sir. The operation was a total success,” I said. “The Syrian Liberation Army has been totally neutralized.”

Stupid me! I waited for a Well done, Carter. It didn’t come.

“I have work to do, Carter,” Hawk said gruffly.

I took that as my cue to go, stood up and walked to his desk.

“We’ll be in touch,” he said. Then, puffing out a cloud of poison gas, he looked down at the papers on his desk. He pressed a button on his desk and three doors swung open silently. I walked into the supply closet and the doors again closed.

Ten minutes later, walking down the hallway, I thought once more of Leah Weizmann, with whom I had spent my last night in Tel Aviv before flying back to the U.S. She had driven me to Lod Airport, but hadn’t waited at the gate to watch me board the plane. She was too practical for any kind of sentimental goodbye. Shalom was all she had said.

Hawk? He’d always be around.

Smiling to myself, I left the building and walked out into the sunshine...

Content

Nick Carter
Thunderstrike in Syria

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen