"Stop! Stop!" Powell shouted. The heavy weapons went silent. Unslinging a Kalashnikov, Powell ran to the burning truck. He circled the wreck, crouching as ammunition popped. One scream came from the cab. Powell sighted into the flames and triggered a quick burst. Then he ran back to the Americans and Shias.
"That's it, gentlemen," Powell yelled. "The rockets are now ours!"
Gadgets jumped from behind the grenade launcher, ran back to the trailers. Lyons and Powell followed. Shias opened the doors of the four trucks and threw out the bodies of the Syrian drivers.
Climbing up on a container in one of the trailers, Gadgets checked the bolts along the roof. Then he worked his way to the front of the container. He saw Lyons and Powell standing below him.
"Whoever designed all this had his act together. Supersimple. Unscrew the wing nuts on those bolts, then unlatch this thing here and the roof comes off. If you're going, say, sixty miles an hour, you can just eject the roof. They must've spent years working out all the technical details on this hit."
"You checking the rockets?" Lyons shouted over the noise of the idling diesel engines.
"I'll check the rockets, you get this convoy ready to move. Faster we move, more chance we'll make our score."
"What about the base?" Powell asked. "Thought you came here to hit it."
Lyons laughed. "After this, the Syrians... they'll bomb it. They'll bring bulldozers and bury it. Anything to cover up the evidence."
In a Zil limousine borrowed from the Soviet embassy, Zhgenti and Desmarais watched the Iranian embassy, one short block away. Other vehicles military trucks, unmarked civilian cars, panel trucks served as observation posts for his men on other streets. And behind the walls of a vacant mansion in this quarter of French colonial-period estates, two platoons of Syrian commandos waited in reserve.
The military vehicles would not appear suspicious. On this night of rebellion and chaotic warfare, Syrian security units had taken positions everywhere in the city. No common people braved the streets. Soldiers maintained martial peace in the Syrian capital.
"If the Americans come," Zhgentisaid, "they die."
"Whenthey come!" Desmarais countered. "Not if. I am sure."
"You are so familiar with them that you can foretell their moves?"
"They are ruthless killers, death-squad goons. They have no restraints. Their government does not control them. They do as they will. If they came to kill Iranians, they will come to the embassy. They care nothing for international law or the rights of diplomats, they will..."
"The Iranians?" Zhgenti asked, confused by her impassioned diatribe.
"No! The fascists! The Americans! But their own lust for murder will betray them, lead them into the trap we've set."
"If they come..." Zhgenti commented. "And do you still have your camera? You can record our victory for the newspapers of the world."
"Yes, here. I hope it still works." She slipped the expensive camera from her shoulder, removed the lens cap, looked through the viewfinder, tested the batteries, turned the focus and f-stop rings. "Somehow, after everything I've gone through tonight, it still operates. But if they come before dawn, it will be useless."
Zhgenti smiled. "For you, just for you, my little Canadian..."
"Quebecois!" Desmarais corrected.
"Oh, yes! As a gesture of socialist comradeship, I will order the Syrians to fire white flares. To light the night for the record of history. The photos will be important for the newspapers. And as Lenin said, 'The press is the greatest weapon of socialism.' Good, yes? He understood the value of stories and photos. But I think we will have long to wait."
They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the lights of the Iranian embassy. In response to the political and religious crisis in Syria, the Iranians had assembled all their staff, all the consuls and attaches, on the grounds of the embassy. The Syrian intelligence service had told Zhgenti that the Iranians denied any part in the fundamentalist assault on the Assad regime. But in response to Syrian surveillance, the Iranians put out a call for all the Iranian diplomatic corps to gather within their embassy.
As Zhgenti and Desmarais watched, vehicles arrived. But none left.
Bored and tired, knowing his men and the Syrian agents also waited for the Americans, Zhgenti relaxed. He watched the Canadian woman watching for the men she hoped to see die.
A very pretty woman. Also a traitor to her country and an enemy to all North Americans. When the Soviet Union took the Americas, she would be among the first to die. International socialism needed no whores like her, selling out her country for expense accounts and free airline tickets.
But a very pretty woman. And willing to do things of interest to a man. A shameless woman. He had seen what she did with that rich Arab, that Muslim warlord with a limousine.
Now Zhgenti had a limousine. Would she do the same for him? He hadn't had a woman since last week in Bulgaria. That woman had been an honest whore, but not very attractive, exhausted by years of caring alone for her children after her husband was executed by the KGB. Rejected by her family, the widow had turned to part-time prostitution to buy her children a few hard-currency gifts good shoes, textbooks, a few tins of meat for the holidays.
An honest prostitute. But not as pretty as this woman who sat with him now.
"Frenchie," Zhgenti said to Desmarais. "How did you get away from the Americans? Show me."
"What?"
"It will pass the time."
"What are you talking about?"
"Like in that other limousine..."
Desmarais reached for the door handle. Zhgenti grabbed her arm and jerked her closer. His thick lips touched the smooth, soft skin of her face.
"You want a bad report to our superiors? You play a very tricky game, my little Canadian. All your lies, all your ways of lying. Perhaps they will terminate your contract. Perhaps they will issue instructions for me to terminate your contract. Or perhaps I will terminate you immediately, and then explain. You have your choice. Do like you did for the Arab."
She did.
As the night unfolded, Zhgenti enjoyed her three more times. Finally, exhausted, only one eye open to watch her, his right hand secure on the pistol in his coat pocket, Zhgenti compared the technique of the Canadian to the pleasures of the middle-aged Bulgarian prostitute.
Rather automatic and mechanical and cold.
Like her lies.
18
"I thought that diplomat was French!" Gadgets shouted over the wind and engine roar in the back of the Mercedes troop transport.
After the hijacking, Gadgets had returned to his equipment to find ten minutes of Russian on his voice-activated cassette recorder. The conversation between the French diplomat and the Syrian colonel began in Arabic, went to French, then turned exclusively to Russian.
Now, huddled amid crates of ammunition and contraband, Gadgets monitored Colonel Dastgerdi and the French diplomat as they conversed in Russian on the road to the Syrian capital of Damascus.
Five kilometers behind their limousine, Able Team and the Shias followed in a convoy of military vehicles and four hijacked cargo trucks. Other convoys jammed the highway as the Syrian army rushed wounded soldiers from the Bekaa Valley to Damascus in empty munitions trucks. Trucks laden with weapons and munitions labored in the opposite direction to resupply the forces still fighting in the Bekaa.
Desperate to expedite the flow of men and munitions between the several rebellion hotspots, the Syrian army waved Able Team's convoy through checkpoints after only quick glances at the drivers and their documents. Following the limousine of Colonel Dastgerdi, Able Team maintained a relentless pace to Damascus.
Gadgets shouted across the back of the troop transport, "Didn't Mr. Marine say that the diplomat in the limo had French identification?"