“Head for their security vehicle!” he screamed.
By the time he did, Matba had already started to sprint. The little Iraqi crawled behind the wheel, slapped the truck into gear, and peeled out of the parking lot. Bogner had barely managed to make it.
Major Mustafa Jahin, along with a small detail of NIMF guards, had been the first to arrive at the Nasrat complex when the alarms went off. He had ordered the gates closed and locked with instructions that no one be allowed to leave and only additional Ammash security personnel be allowed to to enter. He followed that with an order to t conduct a floor-by-floor search of the complex. By the time he reached the laboratory and weapons storehouse area, the Rashids had begun to regain their composure. Talia Rashid, more than her husband, was able to give the NIMF major a rational, but rambling, account of what had happened.
Jahin’s first question surprised her.
“How bad was he hurt?”
“He gave no indication that he was,” she said.
“I saw the blood on his sleeve, but I did not know where it came from and he did nothing to indicate that it was troubling him.”
Jahin moved cautiously, retracing the events that had led to the sounding of the alarms.
“Did he say what he wanted?”
“He demanded to see the chemical and biological weapons development area,” the woman said.
“And you permitted him to see them?” Jahin said.
“We had no choice. Major. The American was holding a gun on us. I have no doubt that he would have used it without the slightest provocation. At times he seemed quite agitated.”
Jahin was still in the middle of his interrogation when he was interrupted by one of his men. The man informed him that they were unable to operate the supply elevator. When he heard that, Jahin smiled.
“Then he is trapped somewhere in the building. Sooner or later our American will run out of places to hide.”
Moments later, while Jahin was still on the telephone, informing his commander that the American assassin of Salih Baddour was trapped somewhere inside the Nasrat complex, he heard the muffled but distinct sound of a distant explosion.
The lights flickered in the laboratory area and the room went black for several seconds before the standby generators kicked in.
Ishad Fahid was standing at the desk listening to Jahin’s report, in what had once served as Salih Baddour’s office, when the explosion occurred.
The floor beneath him buckled momentarily and the room’s two windows looking out over the base imploded. The blast sent shards of flying glass cutting through the air like a million tiny razors, and Ishad Fahid instinctively hit the floor. He felt the needle-pointed splinters of glass gouge tiny holes in his face and hands as he sought to protect himself.
There was a second explosion, followed by a third that was even more powerful than either of its predecessors. Even with the first rays of the early morning sun beginning to shred the darkness of the Ammash night, the sudden eruption painted the walls of the room with an eerie luminescence.
Fahid rolled over, his face tattooed with pinholes of blood, staggered to his feet, and managed to claw his way through the debris into the hallway outside his office. He was screaming for his security guards.
For much of the time since Kizil Burgaz had lifted his battle-scarred Hormone out of the rubble that had once been the village of Koboli, he had maintained just enough altitude to clear the terrain and avoid detection by NIMF air patrols. It was only when he took the twin-Glushenkov-engine aircraft up to an altitude sufficient to clear the last range of low hills west of Ammash that he began gesturing and pointing.
Some fifteen miles directly east of them, the sky had turned a savage orange. By the time Langley had worked his way from the back of the aircraft to the flight deck, the speculation had already begun.
“What the hell do you make of it?” Rogers grunted.
Burgaz shook his head, handed Langley a set of battered binoculars, apologized for the scratches on the left lens, and brought the Hormone around so that Langley could get a better look.
“If that’s Ammash,” Langley muttered, “someone has a big problem.” By then Rogers had worked his way forward and trained his own field glasses on the spectacle.
“Is Ammash, all right,” Burgaz confirmed. He pointed at his radio.
“Burgaz hear them talking to their air patrols. They are ordering their patrols in. They say big explosion in hangar.”
Rogers was still assessing the spectacle.
“We may not actually need those rat packs now, but we’re going to drop the damn things anyway.” He tapped Burgaz on the shoulder, and the Turk gradually pulled back on the cyclic to start the Hormone’s climb. Langley moved back so Rogers could move into the copilot’s seat. He watched as the unexpected display of orange and the billowing clouds of black smoke began to choke the sky over Ammash. From here on out it was all Rogers’s show. To Langley, the colonel’s muttering sounded as though the IS squad leader had decided to milk something else out of his plan. When he wheeled around he began growling orders.
“We stay with the original plan, but in that first pass I want one of you to take out their control tower as well. Got it?”
Langley leaned back against the bulkhead of the
Hormone’s fuselage and braced himself. The rat packs were being dropped and there was nothing to do now but wait for Burgaz to take them in over the base at Ammash.
Bogner and Matba had driven from the chaos of the hangar inferno to the rail switching yards, ditched the security truck, and began threading their way first through a maze of outbuildings near the tracks. Matba located an empty boxcar in a holding area no more than fifty yards from where the switch engine had stopped to watch the pyrotechnics. They crawled in the boxcar and waited for their opportunity.
Everywhere they turned there was a chorus of confusion: wailing sirens, security alarms, and men shouting. Amidst it all there was a succession of explosions as first the hangar was rocked, then the aviation fuel shed at the rear of the building erupted. At first it had been a thunder-flash, with brilliant orange-blue flames shredding the early morning sky. Then came the billowing clouds of acrid black smoke that only occasionally revealed the intensity of the furnace roaring at the smoke’s source.
At first Bogner had seen only a few pieces of firefighting equipment. Then more arrived. But it was obvious now that any effort the NIMF made was going to be a case of too little and too late. Crowds of men milled around and as near as Bogner could determine, they were doing little to combat the blaze. The roaring hangar and the fuel depot had become a death spectacle.
Both Bogner and Matba watched the display for several minutes before Bogner moved to the other side of the boxcar and began studying the switching yards. From their vantage point now they were less than fifty yards from where they had earlier watched the switch engine moving freight cars back and forth between the Nasrat complex and the rail yards. Even then the less-than-clear pieces of Bogner’s plan had started to crystalize. Now, as he looked at Matba, he wondered just how far the little man was willing to go along with him. When Matba finally spoke he caught Bogner by surprise.
“You finish here, you go back to America?”
Matba asked. The Iraqi’s question came across choppy and disconnected, but Bogner understood him.
“That’s the plan,” Bogner grunted.
“Right now that’s a damn big if, though.”