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!"