Cairo Countdown

16

They crossed the open desert in a widely spaced skirmish line.

Starlight guided them through the brush dotting the sand. Lyons and Blancanales pressed ahead, scouting for traces of mines or sensors. Gadgets plodded behind with a load of Armburst rockets and a pack of electronics. He stayed close to Mohammed, who monitored the Arabic of the terrorist gang on a captured walkie-talkie.

"Nothing, man," he reported to Gadgets. "Some honcho just checked the guards. Nothing."

Avoiding an area of open sand, Blancanales pushed through weeds, the brittle twigs and dry leaves rasping on his battle armor's nylon. He saw something on the pale sand. He dropped to one knee, swept his eyes across the ground several times, straining to focus in the starlight. He saw several dark objects.

Rocks? No, too small and round. The triggers of some type of ComBloc antipersonnel mines? No, too many. Sensors? Again, too many.

He reached out, touched one, picked it up. A dry goat turd.

Laughing to himself, he continued forward. But the droppings reassured him. Goats wandered in herds. If the fanatics had mined the desert around their fortress, animals would avoid the area. A full half mile of sand and rocks and brush remained ahead of him. He scanned the night for his partners.

A hundred yards to one side, a black form moved through the darkness. In the blowing sand and shifting patterns of gray and black, only the form's relentless pace identified it as Lyons. Blancanales looked back, thought he saw a form against a gray blur of sand, then it dissolved. Forms appeared and disappeared everywhere in his vision.

Very spooky. Which was very good. If the guards had Starlite scopes or infrared viewers, the sandstorm and blowing weeds might make them doubt what they saw. Blancanales checked his watch. Another hour and a half to dawn. Maybe a full hour of night before the sky began to gray.

He squinted at the dust-blurred lights of the fortress. The wind and sand and night would help them get to the fences, but what then?

Lyons wove through the weeds, avoiding open areas that could be mined. His eyes never stopped moving, sweeping from side to side, not focusing, only watching for shapes or movement. He kept his thumb on the safety of his Atchisson, his index finger straight alongside the trigger guard. Cocked and locked. Clenching his fist would send a storm of steel into the night.

The phone plug buzzed in his ear. Gadgets's voice whispered, "Ironman, Politician. Anything interesting?"

"Nah," Blancanales answered.

Touching the transmit key of his radio, Lyons answered without breaking his pace, "Zero."

"Nothing on the party line, either. All quiet ahead."

After three more minutes of steady marching, watching the lights of the fortress become larger, seemingly more brilliant, Lyons dropped to one knee in the brush. He watched the searchlight sweep the fences and the scraped-flat perimeter, its beam blurred with dust. The guard was directing the beam without pattern or rhythm, sometimes bathing the fence in light, sometimes holding it steady on the naked sand, sometimes skimming the beam across the weeds.

Lyons keyed his radio. "I'm about two hundred, two hundred fifty yards away from the wall. We got one very nervous guard up there. He's putting that searchlight everywhere. Time to group and make a plan."

"Guide us to you," Gadgets answered.

One by one, they drifted in from the night and the swirling dust. Crouching shoulder to shoulder, they kept their heads below the weeds. Mohammed continued monitoring the National Liberation Front's frequency.

Blancanales glanced at his watch. "We have less than an hour of night left, depending on how much dust is up in the atmosphere. There's a gully twenty or thirty yards over there. You four will wait there. Ironman and I will dump these rockets and ammo with you, then crawl a circle around the base. Good enough for you?"

Lyons nodded and turned to Gadgets and Mohammed. "Stay on that NLF frequency. We want early warning on any freakout."

"Will do. Let's move."

The men crept the hundred feet to the shallow fold in the desert. Easing over rocks, they sprawled on the sand bottom. Lyons stripped off his bandolier and the Armburst rocket and his battle armor. The wind chilled the sweat-soaked black shirt he wore. With only his radio, silent Colt and a web belt of mag pouches, he crawled toward the lights. Blancanales moved out a minute later, bearing east.

Snaking slowly through the sand, Lyons heard voices on the fortress walls. The searchlight swept the desert, lighting up the gully for an instant. Lyons froze as the light caught him. But it passed. He crabbed to the side, kept one shoulder against the rocks and crumbling sandbank as he continued. The searchlight returned. Lyons froze again, a shadow in the shadows. The beam held on the gully.

The light revealed every rock and ripple of sand, every shatter-pattern of brittle weeds standing black against the glare. Lyons took the opportunity to study the ground in front of him. Only a few yards separated him from the bulldozed-flat zone that surrounded the barbed-wire perimeter fences.

His eyes searched the dirt. A triangle of shallow depressions marked the end of the gully. From one, a curve of rusted iron protruded. A mine. Beyond the gully, Lyons saw depressions in the no-man's-land. Mines. He could not continue forward. Lyons waited as the light swept up and down the gully. Waited for machine-gun fire or darkness.

Darkness came as the beam shifted to the fences.

The light revealed a scrap of plastic sheeting flapping on the wire. Lyons waited for his eyes to readjust, then slithered from the gully. Brush covered him as he continued. He keyed his hand radio. "Pol. They got mines out here."

"I've seen them. Was that light on you?"

"Not really. They're just jerking off up there." Infinitely slowly, using the light from the fortress walls, Lyons eased through the dry brush. He came to a ridge of rocks and sand and tangled brush plowed aside by the bulldozing of the perimeter clearing. He remembered what Blancanales had taught him. He found a straw-thin twig and swept it ahead of him as he crawled forward. The twig would snag on any trip line without — he hoped — triggering the fuse. Every few feet, he paused to rake his fingers through the sand, searching for the iron of the hubcap-sized mines he had seen. Thorn-sharp dry weeds scratched his hand, rocks cut his knuckles. But scratches did not bother him. Crawling onto a land mine would.

The twig snagged on a line. Studying it in the dim light, Lyons saw a rusted wire. Not monofilament or a strand of almost invisible nylon string, but wire. He followed the wire.

Two Soviet antipersonnel mines stood on the ends of stakes. Rust covered the serrated cast-iron casings. Lyons had followed the wire to the first grenade. Another wire led from the second grenade in the opposite direction. The rust on the cast iron and the green corrosion on the trip-wires indicated months since the placement of the mines. All this astounded Lyons. A fortress of Muslim fanatics, the perimeters defended by mines, barbed wire, searchlights and machine guns, less than an hour's drive from downtown Cairo. What did the Egyptian police and military intelligence units do all day? Pose for tourist snapshots?

What if Able Team searched the remote deserts of the country — what would they find? Soviet air bases? The Lost Tribes of Israel? Martian colonies?

A buzz came through his earphones. "Watch for trip lines," Blancanales warned.

"I'm looking at one now. Strictly junk…"

"Which could blow you away."

"I'm not going to deactivate them. We don't have the time."

Blancanales bellied past a pair of Soviet bombs. Every few yards, he stopped to watch the sentries on the walls. Silhouetted against the night sky or lighted by the reflected glare of the searchlight, they paced aimlessly. Some stood in one place for minutes, smoking cigarettes or talking.

Examining the bare expanse of the minefield, Lyons saw no path to the fence. The small depressions where the sand had settled marked most of the mines. But crossing the no-man's-land would require slow, meticulous probing of every square foot of sand while the searchlight sought out intruders. After that, they faced the eight-foot-high tangle of barbed wire, then a second minefield before they reached the ten-foot-high clay walls.

Wind brought snatches of Arabic from the wall. Blancanales crept through the brush, blown dust and dry weeds masking his small sounds and movement. The searchlight swept erratically over the sand and brush. Blancanales sometimes went flat, motionless as the light passed over him, sometimes used the light to scan the sand for mines or trip lines.

He rounded the corner of the fortress. Now his eyes searched the south wall. Sentries paced the top of the wall. An unused searchlight stood on a pedestal. Floodlights illuminated gates of riveted sheet steel. On each side of the gates, walled sentry positions guarded the approach to the fortress. The muzzles of heavy machine guns protruded from the positions.

Finally, he came to asphalt. Tangles of barbed wire fenced both sides of the entry road, two lanes wide. Floodlights lighted the approach.

No good. No way in but the road. Blancanales thought of the assault on the fortress of Wei Ho. Only surprise and luck gave Able Team that victory. He remembered the image of Lyons, smeared with genipap body-blacking, his Atchisson bouncing on his back, sprinting into a cross fire, vaulting the gate as AK slugs whined past him. Lyons had made it because no sane man would have risked the gate. The next man over, a Xavante warrior brave beyond understanding, had taken AK hits in the chest and leg. But that was another action, another time…

No frontal attack this time. Blancanales believed God gave men only a certain amount of luck. Lucky once, twice, three times, great. Don't depend on it. He'd seen a lot of young men die who had thought they had good luck. Rushing the gate of the Muslim fortress with six men — even with rockets and grenades — would be to hope for infinite luck.

Keying his hand radio, he buzzed his partners.

"I'm at the gate. South wall. We got to rethink this. There's no way in."

"I'm all the way to the east wall," Lyons added. "Don't see any way over the wall. Guess we have to go straight in…"

"Hey, Carl. No way. Maybe tomorrow night. Maybe we can borrow a helicopter from the air force."

"That's too late. There's an American in there! He won't be alive tomorrow. The terrorists will cut him to pieces tonight. We go in…"

"Don't even think it!" Blancanales snapped back. "It would be suicide. You think you're immortal? I'm looking at a steel gate. Two heavy-caliber machine guns. Sentries with rifles looking down on a road as naked as a baby's ass."

"Relax, Pol," Gadgets whispered, trying to calm him. "We'll just have to sedate the wild man if he tries it."

Lyons came on again. "How about driving one of the taxis up to the gate? We could blast it open with rockets…"

"We don't know that the man's still alive. If he's already dead, we'd all die for nothing. The mission first. Even that poor son of a bitch in there would tell you that."

After a long pause, Lyons agreed. "All right. We're pulling back."

Sprawled flat in the gully, Gadgets heard the microrecorder in his backpack click on. He felt the vibration of the tiny motors reeling the miniature cassette. Whispering into his hand radio, he told the others, "Lay cool for a minute. Wizard's got a plan in gear…"

Reaching across the gully to Mohammed, Gadgets hissed, "You listening to that Arabic station?"

"Oh, yeah, man. Listening to the Raghead Rock... Hey! It's a Red Alert! They know we're out here! They're scrambling trucks!"

Gadgets laughed quietly.

Several hundred yards away, Lyons heard shouting in the fortress. He saw sentries running along the walls.

Reaching to key his hand radio, Blancanales whispered from his earphone, "There's a truck coming out the gate. And a searchlight just came on! What do you have on that captured radio? What's going on?"

Mohammed whispered a translation to Gadgets. "The man's sending a squad out to search the desert. Another squad's setting an ambush on the road. They just got word that we're on our way. Dig it! Someone's told them we're coming!"

"But we're already here…" Gadgets laughed quietly, keying his radio. "Things are changing. I think we'll get our chance."

The truck roared past a prone Blancanales. He saw the gates close. Raising himself to a crouch, he observed the truck stop a quarter-mile away. In the red glow of brake lights, he noted soldiers in black uniforms leave the truck. He counted ten flashlights. The flashlights were extinguished as the soldiers left the road and fanned out into the desert. The truck pulled away and continued toward the village.

"Hey, Wizard," Blancanales whispered into his radio, "I don't know what your plan is, but the gate's closed, and they just cut off our retreat. If they find the taxis, they'll know..."

"Hold on! Something else is going on…just a second… we're listening in… Just wait…"

The gates swung open again. More headlights appeared. Two trucks left the fortress in low gear, heading toward Blancanales. The first truck slowed, the second truck stopped only twenty feet away. Blancanales crabbed backward, putting more distance and brush between himself and the soldiers who would be coming out of the truck. He paused to send out a warning on his radio. "Pull out! They sent out two more truckloads of crazies. They'll be combing the perimeter..."

Lyons broke in on the frequency. "There are lights all over the place! It looks like…"

To the east, parallel lines of white lights lighted the desert.