The truck veered to the right and overturned. Powell sighted on the overturned truck and fired a 3-shot burst of 40mm, hitting it with high-explosive, white phosphorous, then high ex again. Spilled gasoline sheetflamed.
Returning his aim to the ridge, Powell fired for area effect. High-ex flashes and white chemical fire splashed the ridge, than a ball of orange petroleum flame surged into the sky as he hit another vehicle.
Lyons saw the silhouettes of a mortar crew and sighted the Browning. A red line of tracers touched the silhouettes. Powell found the crew with a 40mm burst.
No more mortars came. Individual riflemen fired on the convoy, slugs intermittently punching into the wood sidings of the troop truck. All the firing stopped as they left the ambush behind.
Lyons covered the Browning, then glanced back to the Shia militiamen. In the dying flarelight, the leather-faced, middle-aged men grinned and gave Lyons the V for victory. Lyons keyed his hand-radio. "Everyone okay?"
"No problems here," Blancanales responded. "Anyone know who fired at us?"
"You mean," Powell answered, "did we take names? Fuck, no. Ain't killing them good enough?"
"We didn't even get a shot off!" Gadgets complained. "Our guns only cover the road..."
"Hey, Wizard," Powell drawled in his true East Texas dialect. "You just wait. I think you'll get your chance. Any minute now."
A kilometer past Kahhale, a Lebanese army armored personnel carrier blocked the highway. A soldier with a flashlight told the Palestinian drivers of the vans to return to Beirut. Other soldiers manned the machine guns of the APC. Zhgenti did not challenge the orders. He told the drivers to find a way around the roadblock.
A few minutes later, as the vans bumped over a dirt sideroad, Zhgenti cursed. "Storms, revolutions, whores and pretty little soldiers I must kill those Americans and the world is against me. My superiors will not listen to excuses. What a mess. What a sorry mess this is!"
"Illovich is the one," Desmarais snapped back at the Soviet. "He had them prisoner. He wanted a propaganda event. What a dreamer that old man is. I said he must kill them while he had them because they were vile, tricky, fascist bastards who'd do anything, stop at nothing..."
"Not like you, eh?" Zhgenti leered. "My tricky little Canadian."
The vans came to a village devastated by artillery. No lights showed from the windows of the remaining houses. Nothing moved on the streets of frozen mud. As the vans followed the narrow road, their headlights illuminated pathetic vignettes: bundles of rags and stiff hands, staring faces beneath shrapnel-pocked walls; a Syrian army truck that had taken a direct hit, scorched corpses and skeletons hanging from the flame-blackened hulk; a peasant wagon of belongings still hitched to a frozen mule.
A stout Muslim woman waved to them. Inside Zhgenti's van, rifle and submachine gun safeties clicked off. The woman, using an old blanket as a chador, stood at a crossroad. Behind her, a form wrapped in blankets lay on the snow. The woman ran wailing to the Zhgenti's van.
"Ask her which road will take us to the Bekaa," the Soviet told the driver.
The Palestinian shouted down her wailing. He questioned her repeatedly. Finally she pointed to the eastern road. The driver turned to Zhgenti.
"Her husband's wounded. She's begging us to take her to the highway. Or he'll die."
Zhgenti rolled down his window. Pointing an Uzi with one hand, he fired a burst into the blanket-wrapped old man. An arm reached up and clawed the air.
The old Muslim woman shrieked and beat at the van's door. Laughing, the Soviets and Palestinians fired point-blank into her face. She fell back and sat on the snow, blood gushing from enormous wounds to her head. Zhgenti leaned out and fired a long burst that spilled the old woman's brains. Smiling, displaying all the porcelain and stainless steel of his teeth, the Soviet turned to Desmarais. "Remember, my little French Canadian. Never let yourself forget that I am also a vile, vicious bastard who stops at nothing."
Shuddering with the horror, not opening her eyes, Desmarais answered. "I know, I will not forget."
Pretending to sleep, Lyons stayed low in the back of the troop truck. He held his Konzak assault shotgun under the blanket covering him.
The Syrians paced around the trucks and Rover. Lyons heard Powell talking in Arabic, followed by Arabic voices shouting back and forth, then boots hitting the road. Someone strode away the boots splashed through the mud beside the asphalt, continued a few more steps. Powell had gone to the sandbagged bunker at the side of the highway.
Clicks came from his hand-radio but Lyons did not dare move a hand to return them, not while Syrian sentries surrounded them. Voices came from the bunker. Then the boots returned and the Rover's engine gunned. Hussein clashed the gears as he shifted and then the troop truck moved. Behind the truck, the diesel of the semi roared.
Lyons finally lowered the blanket from his face. Only dark hills and snow surrounded them. His hand-radio clicked again.
"How'd we get through that?" Gadgets asked.
"I don't know," Lyons told his partner. "I kept a blanket over my head. Ask the Marine. I heard him walk into the guardhouse and talk with someone."
Powell came on with a laugh. "Hey, don't get spooked. I told you this would be tight. It's just started, you hear me?"
"What went on in the guardhouse?" Lyons asked.
"The officer on duty questioned me. Wanted to know all about us. Why we'd risk being on the road tonight, why I, a Soviet, would be with the convoy and what was in the truck..."
"What'd you tell him?" Gadgets interrupted.
10
In the underground factory, Syrian technicians completed final checks of the Soviet BM-240mm rocket-firing systems. They shouted questions and answers to one another, some gathered around the cargo containers, others inside them. Senior technicians watched the digital displays of instruments that monitored the firing circuits.
Workers were moving everywhere in the factory. Mechanics checked the bolts securing the cargo containers to the flatbed trailers. Clerks passed the workbenches to inventory machines and tools. Skiploaders moved crates from the workshops to the far walls, stacking them for later transport.
At the steel doors to the underground complex of offices and workshops, groups of soldiers with slung Kalashnikovs stood talking of the political war and the attack by the Muslim Brotherhood. As guards for the trucks, the soldiers would not begin their duties until the convoy of rockets left for America.
Colonel Ali Dastgerdi directed every detail of the final assembly.
Now, in the last hours of the greatest project of his career, after years of work, Dastgerdi would not allow some petty distraction of a technician to rob him of victory. He stood behind the engineers as they compared the test impulses to the amperage specified in the manuals. He watched the electrical technicians check the conduits leading into the trailers. He climbed inside each flatbed trailer and checked the soldering of the firing wires to the fuses of the rockets.
With a workman's ladder, he went to the roofs of the containers and examined the bolts securing the aluminum sheeting to the side walls. Then he touched the release latches to confirm the lubrication of the moving parts.
Nothing could go wrong. He could not accompany the rockets from the underground factory. He could not travel through the Bekaa to the Mediterranean, then to the mid-Atlantic, where the crane ship from Nicaragua would transfer the containers to a freighter for the final segment of the trip to the United States. He could not ride in the trucks transporting the rockets to the capital of the United States.