Cairo Countdown

9

Stepping through the gate in the barbed-wire barrier, Gadgets heard boots hammer the stairs. As he raised his radio to warn his partners, autofire shattered the silence. He fell flat on the roof and slipped out his Beretta.

Gunmen ran across the roof firing Kalashnikovs and Uzis. Gadgets saw the shadowy forms of his partners disappear behind the cover of the brick walls. The gunmen advanced, firing continuously, slugs sparking with the brick, chips of bricks and mortar flying. The barbed-wire fence jerked and swayed as bullets hit the wire, splintered the supports. Gadgets crawled to the cover of a roof fan. He leveled the Beretta.

Shouts in Arabic stopped the rifle fire. A gunman looked over the low wall dividing the roofs of the two apartment buildings. His head jerked back as a silent .45-caliber slug smashed through his face, his skull exploding as bursts of slugs pierced the darkness.

A gunman set down his Uzi and dug into the thigh pocket of his military-style pants. Over the night-glowing sights of his silenced autopistol, Gadgets watched the gunman's silhouette make the motion of pulling a grenade's safety pin. The silhouette stepped forward, an arm arcing back for the throw.

Three 9mm steel-cored slugs ripped through his shoulder and head. The dying man dropped the grenade as he staggered backward and collapsed. The Muslim terrorists turned to their fallen comrade. One man shouted to the others. Their weapons went silent for an instant as the gunmen dived away.

Thousands of steel fragments shredded them in mid-motion. A pause followed the blast, then the moans and cries began. Gadgets crept backward, retreating from the rooftop.

Lyons and Blancanales leaped through the gate, called out, "Wizard!"

"Where are you?"

"Here!"

"Move it!" Lyons rushed past him, the modified Colt Government Model held out at arm's length, firing round after round as he found targets in the tangle of wounded terrorists.

"Hey!" Gadgets shouted. "Time to get out of here."

Then Blancanales ran past, his Beretta showering brass on Gadgets. Taximan Mohammed followed, Uzi in hand, the bag of thirty-round magazines swinging on his right arm.

Gadgets saw Lyons change Colt mags, snap a shot into the head of a wounded man, take the man's Uzi. Then he was firing bursts down the stairs.

Gadgets ran to join his partners.

At the head of the stairway, Lyons emptied the Uzi into the terrorists on the landing below. Dropping the empty magazine, he returned to the dead gunmen sprawled on the roof to find another loaded Uzi, then another. Blancanales grabbed a bloody AK, snapped shots down the stairs.

"There's no ammunition," Lyons shouted to Blancanales. "We surprised them; so they grabbed their rifles and ran up here. Check the sentries…"

Ripping open the pockets of one man, Blancanales found a grenade. He flipped over other corpses and found a belt pouch with two Uzi mags.

"Sixty rounds, plus whatever's in the guns. And this…" He held up the grenade.

A gunman lurched up, lashing at Blancanales with a knife. Lyons pointed the Uzi at the wounded man. Blancanales kicked the terrorist in the gut, doubling him over, then kicked him in the back of the head. The man arced back in wide-eyed agony. Blancanales grabbed the knife, stomped down on the terrorist's throat twice. Blood frothed.

"Ready to go?" Blancanales asked, slipping the knife under his belt. He hooked a finger through the safety pin ring of the grenade.

Lyons nodded. Mohammed and Gadgets ran up, Mohammed snatching a glance downstairs. He snapped off a burst. A death-scream ripped the night.

"There's one for Maha'alot," they heard the "Egyptian" say, his expression grim, out of character for the comic taxi driver he claimed to be. Then his manic grin returned. "Let's go, cowboys. Corral full of snakes down there."

Jerking the pin out of the grenade, Blancanales let the lever fly free and threw the frag down the stairway. The heavy thud puffed dust.

Lyons and Blancanales disappeared into the swirling cloud, their feet quick but silent on the blood-splashed stairs. Gadgets braced his Beretta against a railing as he watched for targets. Mohammed waited a second, then crept down the stairs.

The stairs opened to a hallway. Blancanales glanced in one direction, snatched his head back as slugs shrieked past. Lyons searched the several corpses at the foot of the stairs, looped the sling of a second Uzi over his left shoulder, pocketed several Uzi magazines. He snapped out a loaded banana mag for an AK and tossed it to Blancanales.

Pointing in the direction of the autofire, Blancanales shouted, "I'll draw fire, you hit them."

"Forget that! I'll get Muslim volunteers."

"What?"

"Mo-man, help me here!"

With the help of the taxi driver, he lifted a dead terrorist upright and heaved the standing corpse forward.

Autofire from both ends of the hall ripped past the body, one jerking an arm, another spraying gore from its chest. Squatting low, Blancanales sighted on a scarf-wrapped head and punched a 7.62mm hole through the woman's head. She flew back, still alive, her hands clutching at the wound in her skull. Hands grabbed her to drag her out of the line of fire. Blancanales waited until the man exposed a shoulder, then put a slug through his body. The man rolled into the open, and a second slug smashed through his head.

Lyons lay on the floor, squinting through the Uzi's peep-sight, watching a doorway. He saw an exposed arm. He waited. An AK muzzle appeared, then eyes looking for a target. Lyons flicked the trigger, two 9mm rounds pocking the man's forehead. Brains splashed plaster, a rifle held in a dead hand clattered on the hallway tiles.

"Mo-man," Lyons called out. "Another volunteer!"

The "Egyptian" struggled with the deadweight of a second bloody corpse, finally dropping it. "This one crawls…" He shoved the corpse over the smooth tiles with his foot.

Blancanales and Lyons watched both ends of the hall. No terrorists showed themselves.

An arm appeared from a doorway, Lyons fired, but…

"Grenade!" Lyons screamed.

Blancanales and Mohammed ducked down. Lyons saw the olive-drab cylinder hit the tiles, bounce down the stairway alcove. He ducked, cupped his hands over his ears.

Plaster fell from the ceiling and walls, dust clouded up the stairwell. Lyons dashed for the door from where the grenade had come, screaming like a dying man, an Uzi in each hand.

A teenage girl, a mad smile on her face, looked into his eyes, took bursts in the face and chest as Lyons rushed her. He kicked the dying girl aside, sprayed fire into another terrorist behind her.

Lyons surveyed the room. Nothing moved. Stacks of heavy crates lined the walls; words stenciled in Russian and Arabic identified the contents. He saw a curtained closet, glanced under the curtains, saw sandaled feet. He fired a burst. An old man fell out, screaming, holding a gut wound. Lyons fired once into the mullah's head.

Firing continued in the hallway. Lyons let the Uzi hang by its strap to key his hand radio. "This room's clear. Can you break out?"

"We got two rifles at the other end, we'd risk..."

"Don't. I'll try something."

"What?"

"I'll tell you when I know."

Throwing back the lids of the shipping crates, Lyons found Kalashnikov rifles in one case, hundreds of AK magazines in another, then a crate of RPG rockets and launchers. Wasting precious seconds, he continued searching, hoping to find some of the SAM-7 missiles responsible for downing the Air Force jet.

He found no antiaircraft missiles. He reopened the crate of RPGs, loaded a launcher. He went to the corpses and checked their pockets. He buzzed his partners. "I got two frags. I'll bounce them past you. Make your move after the second one, I'll cover..."

"Do it!" Gadgets shouted the length of the hall. "Stop talking! We got to get out of here!"

A grenade bounced past Gadgets, continued to the end of the hall. Covering his ears, Gadgets crouched down beside Mohammed. The blast ricocheted tiny bits of steel off the ceiling and walls and floor. The rifle fire started up again.

The three men sprinted through the dust and smoke. Gadgets saw Lyons crouching outside a door. Did he have a rifle or what?

Sliding on the tiles, jarring into Lyons, Gadgets took cover inside, reached back to grab Mo-man, then Blancanales. The AKs down the hall fired wild.

A shrieking flame answered.

The gift from the Soviet Union rocked the building, but now, instead of murdering Israeli children or housewives, the warhead vaporized the group of fanatics cowering behind a two-foot-thick brick wall.

"Superior firepower," Lyons shouted as he reloaded and recocked the Russian weapon. "Taxi driver. Read what's on those boxes. Any of those SAM-7s?"

"No antiaircraft missiles," Mohammed told them. "Only infantry weapons."

"Rockets for everyone," Lyons ordered. "Get with it! We got to search this hellhole. Room by room."

In the crates, they found vests that served as load-bearing equipment for carrying rockets. The vests looked like bibs with long pockets in the front. The four men slipped into the vests, crammed rockets in the huge pockets. Gadgets and Mohammed took launchers. They went to the door.

Gadgets turned to Blancanales and Lyons. "What happens if we fire these point-blank?"

"Don't know…"

"Don't!" Mohammed told them. "A friend did in Lebanon."

"Move it," Lyons said. "Find those SAM-7s and we go home."

Stepping to the doorway, Mohammed stayed behind the shelter of the wall and fired diagonally across the hall. Backblast seared the apartment's wall. The blast itself sent chunks of brick bouncing through the hallway.

Gadgets went next, leaning into the hallway, firing at the back apartment. Heavy with weapons and rockets, they rushed into the swirling dust and smoke. Pausing only to check on the position of their partners, Gadgets and Mohammed fired rockets continually, reloading on the run.

Vast holes appeared in apartment walls. Rushing through doorways, they looked for more of the Russian-marked crates. They found none. The other rooms held only personal possessions of the terrorist group. They saw walls covered with posters of Khomeini and Arafat and the red, white, green and black flag of the PLO.

Flames licked from burning furnishings. Through the smoke, Mohammed saw a movement in a doorway. He ran to the door, shoved the launcher out at arm's length and fired blind. The explosion in the apartment threw Blancanales back against the wall.

Slugs punched the wall next to Blancanales's head. Lyons spotted a form in the smoke, fired an Uzi in each hand.

"Down!" Gadgets shouted out. "Rocket ready!"

The others went flat as Gadgets dodged from a doorway and fired the RPG from his hip.

The rocket's explosion sheared away a wall, smashed out a back wall.

Blancanales crawled forward to glance into the last apartment. He saw only a torso and legs remaining of the gunman. Scanning the apartment quickly, he spotted no shipping crates.

"No rockets in there. Maybe the old man meant the RPGs."

"Ironman," Gadgets called over to him. "Time to get out of here! The Egyptians will call out the army!"

"Not yet. We'll search the other rooms on the floor, get out over the roofs."

"Those rockets! Look!" Mohammed shouted. He stood at a hole in the wall, gazing down at the alley behind the apartment building.

Evening air cooled their faces as they all looked down. They saw teenagers scrambling over a truck. Some of the young men waved AK rifles at onlookers to warn them back, others struggled to cover the rack of rocket tubes on the back of the truck with a black tarp.

"Dig that," Mohammed laughed. "A Katyusha. That's what that mullah saw…"

The truck carried a rack of forty 122mm rocket-launching tubes. Though capable of raining a salvo of high explosives on a target, the rockets of a "Stalin's Organ" flew like artillery shells, without infrared or radar-homing warheads. A Katyusha presented no threat to high-flying aircraft.

"Wrong rockets, wrong goddamn place," Lyons cursed.

"As long as we're here anyway…" Gadgets pulled off the safety cap of an RPG, cocked the launcher's hammer. "Stand back for backblast!"

Leaning through the shattered bricks, Gadgets sighted on the rack of rocket tubes and pulled the trigger. The flash lighted the night. "Katyusha out of order!" Mangled terrorists flew from the flaming truck. Bystanders scattered, though Gadgets had known his aim was sure enough to avoid reckless endangerment.

A blast threw them back. Shock rocked the floor and walls. Sections of ceiling fell. As Blancanales hit the heaving floor, he saw the rear wall of the apartment building fall away. A wave of flame rushed upward. The night returned for an instant, then another sheet of flame roared up.

Gadgets lay on the floor, stunned. Blancanales grabbed him by the coat sleeve to drag him back.

"Secondaries! This is not the place to be!"

Mohammed took Gadgets's other arm. Lyons rose to his feet. He staggered with an Uzi in his right hand and another Uzi dangling by a strap from his left wrist.

"Come on! The building's falling!" Blancanales shoved Lyons over to Mohammed the taximan. "Move him out of here."

"Hey, it's been a blast. But we gotta go!"

Another explosion brought down more plaster and bricks. A slab of plaster broke over Lyons's shoulders. He shrugged off the white dust, staggered after the others, steadying himself with his left hand against the wall. Blood streamed from his hair, flowed down his face. Mohammed glanced back at him, grabbed his arm and helped him toward the stairs.

"You all right, man? You ready to go up those stairs?"

"The rockets are here," Lyons gasped, the Uzi clattering against the wall. "They're here someplace."

"We got their rockets! So forget about finding any more, okay? Please? We hit any more rockets in this place, we check in El Motel Allah."

"I mean, in Cairo. In Cairo. The rockets are in Cairo." He staggered, blew blood off his lip. "Somewhere."