Rain of Doom

15

A white flash, then a concussion came as a shell exploded along the wire surrounding the village. Rocks clanged on the Zil. Akbar switched on a radio mounted under the dashboard and spun through channels of static.

Two hundred meters ahead was the outer gate, a squat bunker and watchtower providing security for the entrance. Lights on poles flooded the gates with day-bright glare. But no soldiers stood guard. No soldiers moved in the watchtower.

Rockets screamed overhead. All four men looked up, as if they could see the fire arcs of the rockets through the Zil's roof. Seconds later, they heard the distant explosions.

"It's jobs like this," Gadgets commented quietly, "that make me think about quitting government work. Sometimes it's just too, too much."

No one else spoke. Akbar guided the Zil through the ruts and drifting snow. The headlights revealed the sandbags and heavy machine guns of the bunker. But no soldiers.

Akbar stopped at the gate. No challenging voice came from the bunker. They waited. Akbar rolled down his window and called in Arabic.

No one came out. Lyons rolled down his window. He saw no one. Then he leaned over the front seat and pressed on the horn. Only Gadgets spoke. "Too weird."

Soldiers appeared. Wrapped in blankets, flashlights in their hands, they looked at the Soviet limousine. Lyons rolled up his window as Akbar motioned the soldiers over to check his documents.

One soldier dashed to the window, held a flashlight on the signatures and stamps of the documents, then waved the light over the faces of the passengers. Starting to the gate, he shouted.

Another soldier appeared. They rolled the gate open and waved the limo through. As Akbar shifted, a roar crossed the sky. Voices were raised. The soldiers ran for the bunker, leaving the gate open. The roar faded into the distance.

"A jet," Akbar told the others. "They said, 'Israeli jet' and ran away."

"Was it Israeli?" Blancanales asked.

Akbar pointed to the lighted fences, the lighted watchtowers, the lights coming from the low buildings of the village. "This would not still be here."

"It does look like a neon bull's-eye," Gadgets added. "There's no way they could..."

"Quit the speculation," Lyons interrupted. "We're through the first gate..."

"And the second." Akbar pointed. "It is open."

The gate in the second fence, in the center of the minefields, stood open. Akbar accelerated, speeding over the hundred meters of gravel and snow to the inner gate. No soldiers manned the positions at the entry to the village.

An orange-white flash erupted from the frozen earth of the minefield, the scream of the artillery shell simultaneous with the explosion. Lyons looked back and saw dirt and stone falling everywhere around the smoking crater. Other explosions popped as the falling debris triggered antipersonnel mines.

As Blancanales pointed out directions, Akbar wove through the narrow streets of the village. He circled a block of collapsing stone houses, then stopped.

Blancanales oriented his partners. "That way and to the left is the gate. The ramps to what the Agency analysts think is an underground structure is to the right and down two long blocks. There's several houses and shops that are used for administration and technical workshops all along the street."

"Take this..." Gadgets passed one of his canvas bags to Lyons "...and don't drop it."

"You got enough in here to blow this place away?"

"No way. Just minitransmitters and recorders. And radio-pops and det-cord and a kilo or two of plastique."

"Then how are you going to do it?"

"Use your head," Gadgets answered. "Solid-fuel rockets. High-explosive warheads. Why should I carry in the bang when the bang's already here?"

"Ready to go?" Blancanales asked his partners. "Your equipment ready, Wizard?"

Lyons and Gadgets answered by stepping into the blowing snow. Standing in the dark and narrow street, they listened. The distant rumbling of artillery continued. But in the village — the abandoned houses, the shell-shattered shops — they heard nothing: no voices, no movement.

They walked from the limousine. Playing the role of Soviet officers, they made no effort at concealment, walking in the center of the narrow street. Lyons continued to the corner and then stood and looked in all directions, scanning the wide central street for Syrians. Akbar stopped beside him.

"If we run into Syrians," Lyons told the Shia, "we'll just walk past. Unless they're alone, or unless they look like the commander, then we take them, put questions to them."

"Just act natural," Gadgets added. "We're Soviets, we own the place."

Akbar shook his head. "Americans, crazy..."

They turned right, passing boarded-over doorways and windows. Walls of sandbags blocked narrow passages between collapsing buildings. Other than flapping sheets of plastic, nothing moved.

A hundred meters away were lights over a retaining wall of cast concrete, which satellite photos and prisoner information identified as part of a ramp leading to an underground complex. But neither the satellite nor the prisoners had provided information on the interior. Rouhani, the leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards captured in Mexico, did not have the intelligence or memory to sketch the complex. And the Syrian official, Choufi, captured in Nicaragua, had never actually entered the underground area.

Lyons spotted footsteps, imprinted on the recent snow, leading from the street to a doorway. Signaling the others to stop, he handed the canvas bag of explosives to Gadgets, who passed both bags to Akbar.

Then Lyons slipped out his silenced Colt and went to the door to listen. He heard only silence inside. Pressing his back against the stone wall, he exposed one hand as he worked the latch lever.

The door opened. Warm air blew past his face. Lyons waited, listening. An arm's distance to his side, Gadgets and Blancanales watched the street. When Lyons moved, Gadgets shifted, bringing up his Beretta 93-R to back up his partner.

Lyons crouched beside the door of the dark shop, listening, his eyes sweeping the black interior. He smelled diesel exhaust and machine oil and the stale odor of many men breathing and smoking and sweating. The faint sounds of voices and movement came to him.

A line of gray light glowed across the room. Holding the Colt in his right hand, Lyons felt through his pockets for a flashlight. A beam appeared from behind him. Gadgets swept the interior with the tiny light of a disposable penlight.

Then the other three men stepped silently into the room. Blancanales eased the door shut. The penlight revealed tables and chairs, a recently swept floor, a poster of Khomeini on the wall, and another door on the opposite wall.

"Smell it?" Lyons whispered.

"Like a garage," Blancanales answered.

Crossing the room in two steps, Lyons crouched beside the second door. He put his fingers to the crack between the floor and bottom of the closed door. Nodding, he pointed to the door.

Akbar stayed back, the two canvas bags of explosives in his hands, as Able Team snapped into a routine of long experience: Lyons stood beside the doorway, his back to the stone-and-plaster wall, while Gadgets and Blancanales took positions to provide crisscrossing cover fire. Then Lyons opened the door and rushed through the doorway.

A long concrete corridor, presently unpopulated, stretched before him; obviously, it connected several buildings. Gray light from the ends of the corridor revealed doors on both sides. Handrails indicated stairs leading down. Lyons motioned Gadgets to follow. Blancanales stayed behind to watch their backs.

Silently, Colt in hand, Lyons rushed to the stairs, whose steel-mesh steps descended to a place from which voices and banging emanated.

He tried the knob of the nearest door; the door opened. Using his flashlight, he saw a large workshop. Tables with electrical outlets lined the walls. In the center, patterns in the stained concrete floor indicated places where machines had been bolted to the floor. Posters of the Ayatollah Khomeini glared down from the wall.

The building lurched, and the roar of an explosion overwhelmed Lyons for an instant. Stones rattled and dust trickled down from the walls and ceiling.

Returning to the corridor, he motioned for the others to come. Gadgets relayed the signal to Blancanales and Akbar. While they rushed to the end of the corridor, Gadgets maintained his position, then joined them.

In the workshop, Lyons whispered to his partners, "That passage leads underground. Sounds like they're working down there. Maybe assembling the transportation for the rockets."

Gadgets opened a canvas bag and sorted through plastic envelopes by the glow of his penlight. "The fact is, they ain't up here. That tells me they're probably down there. Hiding out from the war. Getting their show on the road. Thing to do is to go take look-see. And for that, I want to volunteer..." he grinned and pointed to the young Shia militiaman, "...Akbar."

"Me? I am not trained to be a secret agent."

"No problem," Gadgets jived. "Go down, walk around, listen to what the people are talking about, and if you see the main man, stick one of these near enough to monitor what he's saying." The Able Team electronics specialist put three thick button-sized minimicrophone-transmitters in the Shia's hand. "But be cool about it. Go — we'll cover you."

Not allowing Akbar time to think, Gadgets and Lyons escorted him to the steel steps. Gadgets whispered a last warning as Akbar crept slowly, silently down the stairs.

"Be cool... or get cooled."

Every step down took Akbar farther from the security of the weapons of the Americans. In his home streets, in times of trouble, he had often obeyed orders that placed him at risk — holding a position despite artillery and small-arms fire, or running shipments through the checkpoints of hostile militias, for example. But then his militia, a force equal or superior to the enemies he faced, backed him and provided firepower in case of a reverse or miscalculation. Now he faced the professional, career soldiers of the Syrian army, and its secret police, with only three Americans standing behind him.

But he prepared himself, intellectually at least, and continued his descent. He reached the bottom of the steel steps. No sentries challenged him.

A long, empty passage led to a rectangle of light. Standing beside the last step, Akbar saw through the rectangle Syrians operating forklifts. He waited a moment, listening, then approached the light.

As he walked, he loosened his scarf and unbuttoned his overcoat. Passing a doorway, he glanced inside and saw two soldiers packing small boxes into a wooden crate. They did not look up.

At the end of the passage, he braced himself, then stepped around the corner and into the glare of the fluorescent lights. He saw an underground factory in disarray, as though in the final stage of disassembly.

At the far end, men in civilian coveralls crowded around diesel trucks and trailers. Syrian soldiers stood at troop transports. Everywhere soldiers and technicians worked to dismantle the facility.

Then Akbar saw the commander. The Syrian wore a tailored uniform and a Soviet wool greatcoat, and talked with men in coveralls, his breath clouding. The group referred to blueprints and drawings, then one of the technicians called to some type of assistant, who ran to a trailer and brought back a notebook.

Someone grabbed Akbar. "What are you doing?" A voice demanded.

"Ah..." Panicking, Akbar could say nothing as the hand spun him.

"Nothing! That's what you're doing!" A Syrian noncom shoved the handles of a moving dolly into his hands. "Take this box to the others. It's tools, hear me? Don't let it get packed in the wrong crate. Move!"

Without speaking, Akbar wrestled the dolly into a roll. Not knowing where to take the wooden box, he aimed for the table of blueprints where the Syrian commander stood with the technicians. As he approached, he slipped his hand into his pocket and removed one of the miniature microphone-transmitters.

The box banged into a workbench; Akbar lost his grip and the dolly slammed down onto the concrete floor. The commander and his staff looked at him, then resumed their conversation.

Squeezing between the blueprint table and the box, Akbar placed a minitransmitter under the table. Then he struggled with the heavy box for a moment. Jerking the dolly back, he wheeled past the commander.

Akbar looked for a place to dump his cargo. Beyond the diesel trucks and trailers, he saw the Mercedes limousine, the doors open, an orderly loading luggage into the trunk. Steering the dolly past the trucks, Akbar swung around to the front of the Mercedes and looked back. A diesel truck blocked the sight of the soldiers at the troop transport. The open trunk lid blocked the sight of the driver.

As he passed the rear door of the limo, Akbar pretended to stumble again, letting the dolly slam down. As he struggled, he tossed a minitransmitter into a compartment in the door of the limousine.

Moving fast, he left the box near the second trailer. Jogging behind the dolly, he wove through the forklifts and worktables to the passage leading up.

The noncom spotted him. "What took you so long? Go in there and take another box."

Akbar saluted. "Sir! My lieutenant ordered me up to the street. To stand guard."

Squinting his sun-weathered eyes, the noncom sneered. "You deserve it, you lazy creature. Go up there! Freeze! Let the Israelis blow you up! Go!"

Akbar ran up the steel stairs.