Cairo Countdown

8

The neon lights advertised cafes and restaurants. Groups of well-dressed men stood on the sidewalks. In the back seat of a taxi, Lyons and Mohammed held the bleeding mullah between them as they surveyed the street. Lyons watched the sidewalks, the open eateries, the countless Egyptians enjoying an early-evening coffee or dinner, but he knew he would not spot sentries. Anyone could be a sentry. Sentries could be watching from the rooftops of the apartments.

Lyons saw taxis carrying tourists weave through the traffic and the double-parked autos.

So it works both ways, he thought. We can't spot them, maybe they can 't spot us. Maybe.

"There, that place," Mohammed translated, looking at a cafe crowded with students and young professionals. Lounging in wicker chairs around small tables, the young men drank coffee from tiny cups. Groups talked, some argued, others read newspapers.

"That's a hangout for fanatics?"

"Garages in back. He says there's an alley. The organization has all the rooms upstairs. A whole lot of dudes up there."

"Where are the missiles? "

"He just says, 'In there, in there.' I don't think he really knows."

"But that's the place?"

"That's what he says."

"He dies if he's lying."

"Oh, yeah. He knows."

Lyons leaned forward. "Abdul, go around the corner slow. I want to look down that alley."

Abdul nodded, eased the taxi through the pedestrians cutting across the street. He stopped as a middle-aged blond man and woman jaywalked in front of him. Horns sounded behind the taxi.

"Tourists," Abdul commented as he rolled through a right turn. As if searching for an address, he peered at the small shops and apartment entries.

Lyons saw a wide commercial alley. Lights illuminated service entries and parked trucks. On the higher floors, balconies jutted from the back walls of the buildings.

"I know how we're going in," Lyons muttered.

"Should've scoped out your partner making like Spiderman," Mohammed told him. "For an old guy, he does all right."

Lyons laughed. "We'll see how you do, kiddo."

"Not me, man. I'll take the escalator."

"And ride straight into a kill zone."

"Never happen. I'm too cool. I'm telepathic. I can see into the future…"

"Oh, yeah?" Lyons continued laughing. "What do you see for tonight?"

"Dead people, man. Dead people."

"Who?"

Mohammed laughed, put out his palm. "Five dollars, I tell your fortune. I tell you who dies."

"Why pay? I'll find out soon enough."

A beeping came from the belt of Sadek's tailored slacks. He touched his pager, smiled to Parks and Katz.

"Excuse me, my friends. This marvelous American invention tells me I must call my office." His smile dropped. Unclipping the tiny box of electronics, he looked at it, held it up to the other men. "If Allah had seen fit that this did not function, if I had not responded so quickly to our friend Hershey's call, perhaps he would have forestalled his unfortunate venture. The irony… Forgive me, I return immediately."

Katz watched the Egyptian liaison officer cross the vast concrete-and-steel vault of the hangar. Speaking for an instant with a soldier, Sadek went to a non-com's desk, dialed a number.

"Does he know of the flight?" Katz-alias-Steiner asked Parks.

"Mr. Steiner, I did as you asked. He doesn't know. But let me tell you, Sadek isn't the spy. He didn't have to help Hershey. He ran out in that street. My men didn't have the guts to do what he did. He's a good man, a professional. Being an Egyptian doesn't make him a fanatic."

Across the hangar, Sadek took notes from what he heard on the telephone. Katz calculated the cost of the Egyptian secret police officer's fashionable suit, his English wing tips, the gold wristwatch. The CIA file on Sadek described him as the only son of an alcoholic poet. Though his father died early, the boy had not suffered. His wealthy relatives showered money and gifts on him. His father's older brother had paid for private schools in Egypt, then English universities. Another uncle held open a vice-presidency in the family's lucrative import concern for the time when the young officer retired from government service.

"If I had not read his dossier," Katz commented, "I would question how a civil servant could live as he does."

"I went to his grandfather's estate. For a high society reception. The man doesn't have to work. He works because he wants to serve his country and his people. Save your time, don't even bother investigating him. I trust the man with my life."

As the taxi rolled to a stop at a restaurant's service entrance, four men stepped out and slipped into the shadows. The taxi pulled away and disappeared into traffic. Surrounded by barrels of garbage and trash, the three Americans and their driver looked like wandering tourists. Their sports coats concealed their radios and shoulder-holstered autopistols. Mohammed concealed an Uzi and several mags in an equipment bag. They carried no other gear or weapons.

Without a word, Lyons led them through the alley's darkness. He pointed to a truck, then to the apartment balconies above the alley. The apartments had European-style fire escapes, the steel landings doubling as balconies. Flowerpots and planter boxes covered the landings. The other men nodded. Lyons stepped up onto the parked truck's bumper and climbed to the top of the cargo van. He tested the ladder, then went up quickly, his neoprene-soled shoes silent on the rungs.

Glancing into the lighted interior of the second-floor apartment as he passed, he saw a middle-aged man and woman watching a black-and-white television. He continued up. In the next apartment, two teenage girls danced to a loud Elvis Presley song. The girls whirled and spun like bobby-soxers in an old American Bandstand show.

Lyons stopped on the last rungs to scan the rooftop. He saw vent pipes and antennas silhouetted against the distant lights of high-rise towers. But Lyons could see nothing in the darkness of the black tar roof. He snaked over the top, crouching in the darkness.

He unhooked his hand radio from his belt. "I'm on top. Waiting for you." Then Lyons spoke to Zaki in the taxi waiting on a side street. They had sent Abdul back to the garage to dump the prisoners. "Taximan. You monitoring?"

"Yes, sir. I'm parked and monitoring."

"When Abdul gets back, have him wait where you left us. Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

The steel ladder vibrated with steps. In seconds, Blancanales swung over the wall, followed by Gadgets and Mohammed. Waiting for their eyes to adjust, they listened. City noises and snatches of music came from the streets below. A ventilator fan grated in its housing. The smells of cooking oils and cigarettes swirled around them. After a minute, they could see gray shapes and the lines of wires within the darkness.

Moving again, Lyons crouchwalked toward the roof of the adjoining building. He felt his way past the guy wires of antennas, his eyes continuously sweeping the shadows and forms ahead of him for the movement of a sentry. He heard only the faint cracking of dust and grit under his shoes.

At the edge of the roof, Lyons waited again as the three shadows caught up with him. They peered over the low wall to the next building. A stereo played loudly beneath them. The roof vibrated with the beat of the music.

The bricks of the two apartment buildings met. There was no airspace or easement between the walls. Scanning the next roof, Able Team and friend saw another expanse of shadows and darkness. The captured mullah had told them that the next building over housed the Muslim Brotherhood group.

"There has to be someone standing guard up here," Blancanales whispered to Lyons.

"That old man jived us," Gadgets grunted.

"Maybe." Lyons gouged a bit of asphalt from the roof, flicked it.

A dog barked, once, twice, then went quiet. They heard the feet of other dogs running across the roof, then more barking. The dogs whined, became silent.

Lyons tapped Blancanales and Gadgets. "I'm making a noise on the far side, then we go over. Berettas…"

Searching through the darkness with his fingers, Lyons found another hunk of asphalt. To avoid silhouetting himself against the sky, he crept over the roof to a fan housing and stood up with the bulk of the housing behind him. He watched the far building for almost a minute. Watching for movement. Then he hissed to the others and heaved the asphalt high over the rooftops.

The four men went over the low wall and ran across baked asphalt and sheet metal to the far side of the apartment building. The dogs barked. A voice shouted. Lyons saw his partners and Mohammed slink away through the antennas and vents. A tangle of barbed wire stopped them.

Barking continued on the opposite side of the roof. The four men spread out along the fence of planks and barbed wire. They knew the security fence would have gates. The group inside the building would have provided for rooftop escape.

Blancanales went slowly, feeling ahead of him for booby traps or noise-making trash. He peered up at the barbed wire, then moved along, fingers sweeping over the gritty surface. He found a bottle, then another, set them far to the side. His fingers found something soft, coarse, like burlap. He felt the shape of it. A dead rat.

He set the stiff, sun-dried rodent where he could find it, resumed his search for the gate. He located a loop of chain and a lock that secured a rectangle of old lumber set between two planks. Crawling backward, he picked up the rat, went back to Gadgets.

"Gate's down there," Blancanales whispered, his mouth close enough to touch Gadgets's hair. "It's got a lock."

"On my way. Two clicks on the radio when you want me to open the gate."

Blancanales continued to Lyons and Mohammed. "The Wizard'll open the gate."

The creaking of a door stopped his whisper. Footsteps crossed the roof. The three men froze in their crouches as the footsteps passed on the other side of the low wall. While the dogs continued barking, the sentry walked a circuit of the other rooftop. A voice shouted in Arabic at the dogs. The dogs trailed off, then one dog barked again, then all the dogs joined in. The sentry shouted once more. A bottle broke. The dogs scattered, finally went quiet.

The footsteps returned to the stairwell, and the door creaked closed. Footsteps went down stairs.

"Give the Wizard two clicks," Blancanales whispered. "I'll toss the next distraction."

Lyons keyed his hand radio twice. Blancanales threw the rat to the far side of the other building's roof. The dogs broke into another fury of barking. Paws scratched on tar as they ran to investigate the bait, snarling and yelping. When they found it, the noise got nastier.

"What the hell did you throw?" Lyons asked.

"A dead rat. The dogs are fighting with each other to rip it up. Now's the time…"

The footsteps ran up the stairs. The door opened. Lyons and Blancanales thumbed back the hammers of their autopistols, then eased up.

In the light from the open door, they saw a bearded middle-aged man rush at the dogs. An Uzi hung from his shoulder. Lyons and Blancanales braced their pistols on the wall to sight on the bearded sentry's chest.

"Wait till he's in there with the dogs…" Blancanales whispered to Lyons.

The sentry waved a flashlight at the dogs, started kicking them. Dogs yelped, ran away whining. The flashlight found a ragged scrap of rat. The sentry poked at it with his foot.

"Sighting in…" Lyons hissed. "Hit him!"

Slugs zipped through the air, a 9mm slug slapping the sentry's jacket, a .45 ACP hollowpoint slamming him back into the crisscrossed barbed wire behind him. Two more slugs bounced him off the wire. He fell flat on the black asphalt, did not move as the dogs ran circles around him, sniffing at the blood.

Lyons spoke into his radio. "Wizard! You through that gate?"

"It's open. What about the dogs?"

"We'll do it." Lyons turned to Blancanales. "Gate's open, but first we waste those dogs. There's no other way. We have to do it. Survival of whoever's fittest to take the grief."

Methodically, Blancanales executed the dogs, his underpowered 9mm subsonic slugs striking with less sound than a slap. Lyons watched over the phosphor dots of his Colt's sights. What he saw was more cruel, somehow, than the killing of men. And more sad. Able Team killed only the bad, and often, sadly, the bad were dumb.

"Goddamn it," Blancanales cursed. He jammed a new mag into the Beretta.

"Forget it, just forget it," Lyons whispered to him, knowing what his friend felt. "We had to. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was them or us. Now let's move it."

As the three men dashed for the gate, other men sprinted up the stairs to the roof. Flashlight beams swept the rooftop and the barbed wire, catching the two Americans and the Egyptian.

Kalashnikov fire ripped the night.