Keith Douglass
Frontal Assault
1
Linda Walsh jolted upward and took a quick look through the shot-out, barred, second-floor window of the United States Embassy in Damascus, then moved to the left against the solid rock wall. The gunfire came again, a deadly drumming of rifles and machine guns. She winced each time one of the bullets slammed into the wall outside. The smell of cordite and smoke drifted through the window, stinging her nose and throat with an acrid bite.
“The idiots,” she said out loud. It would take three hundred of them to overrun the embassy compound, and then it could happen only if they would accept enough casualties. No problem there. The Syrian extremists would love to die for Islam. A martyr’s death for Allah was the highest honor any Muslim could pray for.
Linda held her Walther PP automatic in her right hand. She had drawn it instinctively when she first heard the attack. There was no immediate need for it, but she kept it at the ready. Ingrained company training.
Linda stood tall and slender against the beige wall of the second-floor hall. Her dark hair, cut short on the sides, framed her face. Her brown eyes flashed in anger. Why were they attacking the embassy?
When the spate of firing stilled for a moment, she edged up and looked outside. One white-clad Syrian pushed to the top of the embassy’s ten-foot-high rock wall directly opposite her. Before he could climb over, a red flower of blood blossomed on his forehead, blasting him backward and out of sight.
Time to report in. This wasn’t a chance mob assault. It was planned and programmed. The ranks of white-robed Arabs, all with new Russian weapons. Everyone moving on signals from a manipulator. Arlington had to know.
She ran to the communications room and typed out a report to CIA headquarters. It was encrypted immediately and transmitted at once to the satellite. She told them it was a planned attack, more serious than ever before. A few casualties. She’d do a complete report later.
The radio tech handed her some papers. Two more attacks at two more U.S. embassies in the Middle East all at exactly noon. That meant one hand was behind all of these attacks. Was this the start of a general uprising by Arabs against the United States? The great religious war the Muslims had been promising for years?
She ran back to her post in the hallway and looked out the window, then ducked down quickly. A hot Arab slug burrowed its way into the window casing near where her head had been a minisecond before.
Linda ran to the window just down the hall and took a quick look outside. Three white-clad Arabs rolled over the wall and dropped to the ground inside the compound. One took a round to the chest and died. The other two charged for the outside wall of the embassy itself and moved out of sight of the gunners inside.
She heard a muffled explosion and guessed the Syrians who came over the wall had blown open the locked and unused door just below her. No Marines would be inside at that point guarding it.
Linda went low under the windows and ran down the maroon-carpeted hall to the back stairs that led to the first floor. That outside door was just in back of the steps. She held her Walther automatic ready and crept silently halfway down the stairs. She stopped when she heard whispers in Arabic coming from below her.
They must be the Syrians she saw coming over the wall. She held her pistol high and edged lower on the open stairway. The invaders would have to come past the stairs to get to the embassy’s main front rooms.
The Syrians both charged from their hiding place past the stairs. They came in view almost at once, and Linda tracked one a moment, then fired twice with her Walther. The muhajed was only ten feet away and hadn’t seen her. He took one .380 round in the chest and the other in his neck, spraying the wall beside him with a gushing rain of blood. He stumbled and fell as his automatic weapon chattered, sending lead slugs down the empty hall. The second Syrian turned toward Linda and swung up his AK 74 rifle. Linda had changed targets and fired three times as fast as she could pull the trigger.
One of the rounds hit the Syrian’s weapon, jolting it off target. The second and third tore into his chest, rocking him sideways. He stared at Linda a moment with black eyes of hatred, then he smiled, mumbled, “Shukran,” “thank you,” and died before he hit the floor.
Linda dropped to the steps, looking for any more Arabs. Sweat beaded her forehead and her heart raced. She could smell the raw copper scent of the blood on the wall and pooling on the floor. She kept her pistol trained on the closest Syrian, but he didn’t move.
Footsteps pounded toward her down the front hall. She relaxed when she saw three Marines in their show-off dress blues rushing toward her. Each had an M-16 up and ready.
The Marine sergeant nodded grimly at her. “Good work in here, Miss Walsh. If they’d got down this corridor, a lot of us would have died out there. I think we’ve about got them beaten off.”
It was hot, even for Cairo.
A devil wind whipped down the crooked street, bringing stinging sand on the wings of hot air that scraped the skin off a person’s face and arms if left exposed too long. The local weatherman had promised that this was the last day of the heat wave.
Two young women hurried from one shady spot to the next along Scarab Street, their veils protecting their faces from the blowing sandpaper. They turned into a shop.
Two boys about twelve walked along Scarab Street. They wore white head coverings that protected their lower faces as well. Only their black eyes showed to the world. Each carried a red plastic sack that sagged heavily in his arms. They paused, set down the sacks, and rested, flexing their arms, talking quietly. The taller one looked at his wristwatch and nodded.
They picked up the plastic sacks and walked forward. Twice more, the taller boy checked his watch. The last time he slowed, then they walked casually to the front of a building with a sign in English and Arabic. The English part said: U.S. Petroleum Explorer.
The boys evidently tired again and set down their heavy sacks against the front of the American business and huddled against the facade to escape the savage wind.
They looked at each other, nodded, and walked away, quicker this time. They hurried down the block, around the corner, and out of sight.
Thirty seconds after the boys vanished, the two bags left outside the business exploded with a crackling, roaring blast that demolished the front half of the two-story building. The rest of the second story stood, gaping and exposed like a shameless streetwalker. It teetered there for a moment, then the back part tilted forward, and it all fell with a crashing roar onto the ground floor.
After the sounds of the smashing wood and shattering glass faded and the dust began to settle on the wreckage, one plaintive cry could be heard from the ruins. The cry came again, weaker this time. Once more, it issued from under some heavy timbers. Then it ceased and there was no life left in the American business office.
In three other sections of Cairo that afternoon, at precisely two P.M. local time, three more American business firms were shattered by bombs planted at the fronts of the buildings. Fourteen people died in the blasts, and over forty were injured. Two Egyptians, who worked in one of the firms, survived the blasts.
Ambrose Blount, security officer at the United States Embassy in Cairo and resident CIA man, inspected all four sites within an hour of the explosions. He wrote his report and sent it by top security scrambled radio by three-thirty, Cairo time.
“All four blasts went off within seconds of each other. Two had evidently been set up by small boys who left the bombs in plastic sacks against the fronts of the offices. It was a coordinated attack. I have absolutely no suggestion as to the reason for the terrorism or who could be behind it.”