Rain of Doom at-16 Page 6

  A man ran from the stairwell toward them. Akbar talked quickly with Powell.

  Then Powell told Able Team, "That Commie bitch Desmarais is here. And guess what the Shia security saw in her passport? Entry and exit stamps for the U.S. of A. via La Guardia, then Cyprus, then Beirut. Anybody you know been to New York and Cyprus on their way here?"

  Able Team glanced at one another. Gadgets answered for his partners. "Just us tourists."

  8

  Surrounded by cars of bodyguards, Sayed Ahamed and Anne Desmarais toured the hills of Beirut. The intermittent shellfire had cleared the roads of traffic. Only military vehicles braved the danger.

  But few shells fell near the city or the surrounding villages. The unidentified forces fighting with artillery and small arms along the Beirut-Damascus highway did not fire at the Lebanese militias. They bombarded other unknown forces. Shells and rockets screamed across the dark sky.

  As the war came, the weather changed. The chill, bright afternoon had faded as the onrushing storm front darkened the sky. For hours since leaving headquarters, they had driven through the cold winds, interviewing field officers and lookouts. Sometimes they talked with peasants. But they learned nothing of the fighting. Now snow flurries swirled around the limousine. Desmarais looked out at a landscape of grays and black touched by smears of green and startling white.

  Rockets streaked into a distant mountain amid a flash of red. But no rockets threatened the line of cars carrying Ahamed and the Canadian journalist back to Beirut.

  "But there must be some information on the fighting," Desmarais insisted to Ahamed.

  "The Syrian radio reports nothing. The telephones are dead. My officers have attempted even to contact the extremist groups in the Bekaa. But there seems to be a jamming operation in progress. Many voices, many noises on all the radio frequencies. Total chaos. Even though the fighting is in my country, I know nothing."

  "Not even rumors?"

  "There are always rumors!" The debonair militia chieftain laughed. "Rumors are nothing, less than nothing, for the stories confuse the people and obscure the truth."

  "But what of the stories of the Zionist gangs attacking the Syrian positions?"

  "Is this a question for your newspaper? Or a joke? What Zionist gangs? Do you mean the Israelis? Why would the Israelis attack the Syrians?"

  "To start another war."

  "Why would they start another war? Don't they have enough problems now?"

  "The Americans pay the Zionist gangs to make trouble and war. Then the Americans intervene."

  "Who tells you these stories?" Ahamed leaned close to her. "Do you listen to Radio Moscow? You can tell me. The driver cannot hear or see through the glass." He glanced to the tinted, bulletproof partition dividing the front from the rear.

  "No, not Radio Moscow. I listen to the people of Beirut. I listen to the lies of Zionists and the Yankee imperialists."

  As Ahamed moved closer, she became very aware of the expensive smuggled cologne he wore. For this ride with her into the hills, he had worn his gold rings and Rolex wrist watch, a perfectly tailored uniform and a beret set at a rakish angle on his head. Did he mean to impress the foreign journalist with his elegance?

  Or to seduce her?

  She considered the value of an affair with Sayed Ahamed. As one of the most effective militia commanders — a chieftain who not only controlled hundreds of trained fighters but also led them to decisive victories against opponents of his Shia people — he had earned the respect of all the other militias operating in Beirut. More, he combined his military knowledge with the skills of politics. When he spoke for the Shias, all other factions listened.

  To the citizens of Beirut, Ahamed represented the values of strength and faith. He might emerge as a national leader in the moderate government of conciliation.

  An intimate involvement with Sayed Ahamed would advance her career as journalist and as Soviet agent.

  He whispered again, his words warm on her ear. "Why do you not listen to me? I can tell you so much more. Always the journalists come and question, but then they print what they believe, what they imagine, not what I say. But you, intelligent... and so very pretty..."

  She laughed, putting her head back so that he could look at her throat and down her blouse. "You must be desperate for a press release..."

  He kissed her throat, exactly as she intended. A strong hand touched a breast, stroked her body. She glanced to the driver, to be sure he faced forward. She could see only the silhouette of his head as he drove, the lights of cars and buildings causing his shadow on the bulletproof partition to shift and leap.

  How should she develop this romance? Should she now push away the Shia commander's hands and pretend he had gone too far? Or should she fake a wild passion?

  He spoke beautiful French. He had undoubtedly visited France, perhaps studied in a university there, perhaps lived there for years. What had been his experience with French girls? Had he known only prostitutes? Or had he attempted to bed the good Catholic girls, the sisters of his French friends? As a foreigner, he had certainly encountered French prejudice and chauvinism. The girls in their minis and alluring fashions would flirt, but would they go further?

  She did not have time to play a game. The American terror team had come to Beirut to meet Powell, the ex-Marine, the wild-eyed killer of her Soviet and Syrian brothers in struggle. Powell worked with Sayed Ahamed. If she hoped to locate and mark Powell for death, she must overwhelm Ahamed.

  Ahamed must dream and rave for his new conquest, his French-speaking Canadian mistress, the mysterious journalist.

  Desmarais returned his kisses, her body shifting, moving against him, pushing him back against the door. She covered his mouth with hers, waged a battle of tongues before putting her lips to his throat and tasting the bitter-salt of his cologne and sweat, feeling the fine stubble of his beard against her face.

  He's already hard, she thought, feeling steel against her thigh. She reached down to stroke him, found his holstered pistol. She pushed the weapon to the side. As she touched him, she felt him shudder. Kissing his throat, his chest, she slid down.

  As she unbuttoned his pants, he watched the dark streets pass. No matter how distant the fighting, no civilians risked the streets. He knew the Syrians fought one another, but the radio and television stations did not carry that information. The announcers repeated only the rumors of a Syrian civil war and the assurances of the Council of Conciliation. The people of Beirut had gone to the uncertain safety of their shelters to listen to their radios and wait. After ten years of war, they disregarded rumors and assurances and went underground when they heard distant shellfire.

  She mouthed him and clenched at him. Her head went up and down. Ahamed almost yawned. He gripped her head in both hands and guided her up and down. He did not want her to see him looking at his watch. Checking the time, he realized he should concentrate on this pathetic sex act because if he did not ejaculate quickly she might expect him to join her in her hotel room. And he had other appointments. Already, he had wasted hours to get the woman out of Beirut while Akbar and Powell completed their preparations and departed. Perhaps he should have killed her in the hills. That would have spared him the indignity of a blood test.

  The thought of the millions of syphilis spirochetes now writhing and reproducing on his lips after kissing this Soviet whore and the millions more invading his genitals made him shudder with disgust. The woman mistook the shudder as ecstasy and redoubled her fervor.

  Get it over with, Ahamed silently screamed. Nauseated, he looked out at the boulevard and saw a Syrian Land Rover pass. A Mercedes troop truck followed, then a truck and trailer.

  Akbar, Powell and the other Americans! On their way out of Beirut!

  The neon lights of the hotel appeared. Ahamed saw the lead car swerve into the traffic circle, then the limo. The doorman approached. Ahamed knotted his hands in Desmarais's hair to guide and distract her.

  As the doorman reached for
the handle of the opposite door, Ahamed shoved the woman away and unlocked the door. Her lips gleaming with saliva, Desmarais clutched at his thighs, trying to pull his body down, to drive his rigid organ again into her mouth, and Ahamed pushed her out of the vehicle.

  The doorman caught her. Slapping the partition, Ahamed shouted to the driver, "Go!"

  Gasping, blinking against the lights of the hotel's entry, Desmarais sat in the gutter and watched the limousine speed away. The doorman, who had seen into the limousine, stared at her. Desmarais twisted out of his hands and stood up. Wiping her mouth, she hurried to the hotel entrance.

  As she stalked through the doorway, she turned and saw the doorman talking with a bellboy. The doorman mimicked an erect penis with his fist and thumb, then two men burst into laughter. They watched her watching them and laughed.

  "Miss Desmarais!"

  Livid, she raged with thoughts of revenge. A car-bombing of the hotel? Assassinate the doorman? An air strike on the headquarters of Ahamed?

  She turned and instantly recognized the stoop-shouldered bear of a man at the telephones. Zhgenti! He motioned her to approach. A dark, peasant-faced man from a southern republic of the Soviet Union, he passed without notice among the dark peoples of the Middle East. Only his Slavic accent and faulty French and Arabic betrayed him. But he more than qualified for a field operative with his passion for murder. The KGB would not have sent him for information.

  They sat together. Desmarais did not waste time on greetings. "What happened?"

  "The Americans destroyed the cruiser. All my men and the Palestinians died. Not a trace left."

  "How could that..."

  "How does not matter! Why do you not already know this? All day you have been out, searching for that other American. They are with him. Did you find them?"

  "No. I tried to get the information from Sayed Ahamed, the commander of the militia gang that Powell..."

  "Tried to suck the information from him!" Zhgenti hissed with anger, his eyes narrowing to slits. "I was here. I looked and I saw a whore thrown out of a limousine. The whore was you. Is that how you gain your information? Servicing Arabs in the backs of their limousines? Like a Soho street girl? I should send you to work for the English. But we need you now. Go..."

  "For what?"

  "Take orders, whore!" Zhgenti never allowed his voice to rise above a whisper. He sounded like a snake. He looked like a snake. Desmarais did not dare interrupt him again. "You go to your room. Get warm clothing. And whatever other whore things you need to pass as a journalist. You failed and now we must go to the Bekaa to look for the Americans. Go! Now, or I put a bullet in your head. And not my big bullet. I will give you one that will splatter your brains!"

  Desmarais stumbled to an elevator, pounded the button. She had no doubt that Zhgenti would do as he threatened. As she waited, she looked back. Zhgenti pushed through the hotel doors.

  She saw the two vans waiting in the traffic circle, the broad faces of Soviets in them. Other passengers appeared to be Palestinian contract soldiers. The spray-painted sides of the vans identified them as newsmen in English, French, Arabic and Farsi. But she knew they could not be television technicians. Zhgenti did not travel for news. He traveled to kill.

  The elevator took her to her floor. Running to her room, she quickly packed her overnight bag with underwear and shirts and film.

  In her warmest trench coat, she ran back to the elevator, summoned it. Her overnight bag bounced against her, clinking against the camera under her coat. She glanced at herself in a mirror as she waited. With a scarf protecting her throat and a fur hat on her head, she certainly looked the role of the young woman journalist.

  Only four years before, she had been a struggling writer of romance novels, typing and retyping manuscripts, hoping for a sale but earning only rejections.

  Desperate to make the right connections, she had left Quebec for a job in Toronto as a copy editor at a romance publisher, correcting the manuscripts of other struggling writers. But she never sold her writing until she wrote a column for a leftist newsletter.

  Her editorials denouncing acid rain as an imperialist plot of American transnational corporations earned a call from a man with an accent. He asked her to continue writing her anti-American tirades.

  Checks came. Then airline tickets with a typed list of names and addresses. She churned out controversial interviews and stories that appeared on the op-ed pages of some of the best newspapers. After she'd had a year of excellent sales, a representative of the Soviet Union approached her with an offer too good to refuse. She had no objections to working for the Soviets.

  She loathed Americans and the United States.

  9

  Wearing the uniform of a Soviet advisor to the Syrian army, Carl Lyons rode in the open back of the Mercedes troop transport with two Shia militiamen in Syrian uniforms. Akbar and Hussein, in the cab, also wore Syrian uniforms. Syrian army regulation gloves, coats, wool scarves and blankets protected them from the snowstorm. The truck also matched the vehicles of the Syrian forces.

  They rode in silence, their weapons in their hands. Beside Lyons, a Browning .50-caliber machine gun stood ready on its pedestal, a belt of armor-piercing cartridges in place. An M-79 grenade launcher and a bandolier of 40mm grenades hung from the pedestal. Black plastic secured with a neoprene snap cord concealed both weapons: Syrian forces did not employ the American-made weapons.

  The disguises would be the key to passing through most checkpoints. But if questioned, Hussein carried perfect forgeries of military travel orders.

  A hundred meters ahead, Powell and two other Shias rode point in the Land Rover. Powell wore a Soviet uniform; the Shias wore Syrian uniforms and carried military documents. Plastic covered the MK-19 40mm grenade launcher mounted in the back of the Rover, where loaded RPGs stood ready. Powell needed only to twist off the safety-cap wires, cock the launcher and fire the rockets.

  Last in the convoy, Blancanales and Gadgets enjoyed the warmth of the trailer as they manned a second set of heavy weapons, another Browning .50-caliber and another MK-19. But these launchers and other weapons would be used only if their documents and disguises failed.

  A Shia vehicle passed them without a word. The militiamen stared at the passing Syrians and Soviets with open hatred. Their officer waved; he was the only one who knew that Shias drove the Rover and trucks.

  Continuing east, the convoy left all life behind. Their headlights revealed abandoned vehicles and deserted villages. Far away in the storm and night, the incomprehensible war continued. Rockets and shellfire flashed on distant positions. Flares seared the storm clouds.

  Able Team's three hand-radios buzzed. Powell spoke to the other Americans through a fourth NSA unit. "Gentlemen, we are now in it. I am monitoring the frequencies on a Syrian army radio, and I am hearing very scary things. There are at least three different army factions calling one another traitors and usurpers. They are fighting one another and — here's the joke — they are also engaging with forces of the Muslim Brotherhood. I guessed the political factionalism. But the Muslim Brotherhood is something else. Last time the Brotherhood rebelled, they seized and defended the city of Hama against battalions of the best Syrian troops. The Syrians destroyed the city. A total slaughter. Maybe twenty thousand, thirty thousand people killed: no one will ever know. If the Brotherhood is back, they're back in force and they're out for revenge.

  "I tell you," Powell continued, "the Brotherhood's more than I planned on. Why don't you three reconsider this mission. If you want to go on, okay. But it ain't too late to go back. We could wait for the politics and religion to get straight."

  Lyons answered immediately. "We can't. If those missiles get out, we'll have to search every ship and every plane between here and the White House to find them. I say we go."

  "How long a wait are you proposing?" Blancanales asked Powell.

  "Could be a few days, could be a few weeks before..."

  "Forget it!" Lyons interrupted.


  "Why stop?" Gadgets asked. "Look at all those fireworks! It's the Fourth of July everywhere."

  "We can't risk a delay of weeks," Blancanales concluded. "A few hours, a day perhaps..."

  "Then it's unanimous." Powell sighed. "I hoped you cowboys would exercise discretion, as they say. We just might be going into a four-way free-fire zone."

  The others waited for Gadgets' jive line, but the electronics wizard said nothing. He just held down the transmit key and laughed.

  In the back of the troop truck, Lyons lost patience with his partner and pocketed the radio. He glanced at the two Shia militiamen riding with him. In the darkness, he could not see their faces. Blankets over their legs and feet, they watched the distant firefights. Both held Soviet PKM belt-fed machine guns, the muzzles pointing through the slats of the truck. Their rifles, folding-stock Kalashnikovs, hung from the inner slats, clattering with every bump in the road.

  Four-way free-fire zone, Lyons thought. Then he realized why Gadgets laughed. Able Team always went into uncontrolled zones. In New York City or El Salvador or the Bekaa, always the same...

  The two militiamen started. Lyons heard the sound also. The not-so-distant thunking of mortar tubes. They had ten to twenty seconds before the mortars hit.

  Lyons slipped his Konzak sling over his head and cinched the shotgun diagonally across his back. Standing in the freezing wind, he pulled the plastic sheet off the Browning and secured it to the pedestal with the neoprene snap cord. Ahead, he saw Powell swiveling the MK-19, looking for a target.

  White light seared the night. High above the highway, a magnesium flare swung on a miniature parachute.

  Mortar impacts flashed ahead, the booms of the explosions coming an instant later. Another flare blazed overhead. A random pattern of mortar hits scored the highway and the roadside, balls of smoke hanging in the night. Spent shrapnel rattled off the truck. Hot metal burned Lyons's neck. He tore at his scarf and a jagged bit of iron fell out.