The colonel yelled some more orders and two men grabbed Turcotte by the shoulders, bringing him to his feet. His first inclination was to immediately drop back to the sand, but his training was too strong — that would indeed be a sign of fear in front of these men.
He thought of running, but the field of fire ensured that the bullets would easily beat him to any cover or concealment. He almost laughed. The adrenaline was back, his nerves were alive and alert, his mind racing. If only the threat of death hung over every second of life, then he would always be one hundred percent alive.
“Give me a chance in the desert,” Turcotte said to the officer.
The colonel glanced at the civilian, then shook his head. “I am afraid not.”
“Let me die with a weapon in my hand, then. Even an unloaded one.” If he could only get his hands free, Turcotte felt he might have a slight chance.
A ghost of a smile crossed the colonel’s face. “Do you plan on going to Valhalla? The Viking with his sword or ax in hand to protect the hall of warriors?”
“I work for Area 51, for mankind,” Turcotte said. He nodded his head toward the civilian. “He works for the aliens. He is not even a true human anymore. His mind has been affected by the alien’s machines. Do you serve man or do you serve the aliens?”
The Guide barked something in Arabic. The officer drew his pistol and snapped an order. The six soldiers put the stocks of their weapons to their shoulders.
Turcotte’s arms strained against the handcuffs. The officer stepped to the side, about ten feet away from the firing squad.
He yelled another word in Arabic and Turcotte flinched, expecting rounds to slam into his chest, but it must have been the equivalent “aim.” Turcotte had had enough. He dropped to the sand, scooting his hands underneath him and bringing them to the front. Then he jumped to his feet and charged the firing squad as if going into a gale-force wind, shoulders hunched, body anticipating the impact of bullets.
There were several clicks — bolts slamming home in their breaches — but no rounds were fired. Several of the soldiers were working their bolts, trying to clear what they obviously thought was a misfire. Turcotte didn’t take the time to wonder about this as he grabbed the muzzle of the nearest man’s AK-47 and ripped it out of his hands, turned it about, and slammed the stock into the man’s head, dropping him like a stone. He stepped back, weapon in his cuffed hands as the other five soldiers surrounded him.
The colonel calmly turned toward the civilian and fired one round, hitting the man square in the center of his forehead, blood and brain splattering the sand behind.
The colonel yelled something in Arabic and the five soldiers half turned toward him.
“Get down,” the colonel said to Turcotte in a very calm voice as he swung up a mini-Uzi submachine gun with his free hand from out of the satchel looped over his shoulder.
Turcotte dove into the sand as a spray of bullets cut down the soldiers. Slowly he got to his feet. Turcotte watched the colonel, waiting for whatever would come next.
“We must go,” the colonel said, gesturing with the smoking muzzle of the mini-Uzi toward the truck. “I hope you can drive this thing.”
“Who are you?” Turcotte asked.
“Colonel Ahid Fassid of the Egyptian army,” he said. “Military intelligence. I had to pull quite a few strings to be the one to pick you up at the Nile. Fortunately the regular army becomes very afraid when they see credentials from an intelligence officer of the general staff.”
“I don’t understand,” Turcotte said.
Fassid sighed. “It is the way things are done here. How do you think we have kept the peace for so long? My father and all my uncles died in the wars. We cannot do that anymore. I also work for the Mossad when its aims and mine coincide and no harm will be brought to my country. And the Mossad has done things for me when our aims also have been the same. I received a call from a friend in the Mossad this morning, asking me to keep an eye out for you. This—” he indicated the bodies “—is far beyond anything I have done before. Now I must give up my life here.”
“Why didn’t their weapons work?” Turcotte asked.
“I inspected them,” Fassid said. “And removed the firing pins. Now, let us leave here. A helicopter is inbound to a rendezvous point.”
CHAPTER 19
“My name is Ts’ang Chieh, court official to the most noble Emperor Shi Huangdi, Commander of all the World, the Hidden Ruler whose reign goes from rising to setting sun and beyond.” A smile creased the unlined face. “At least that is what we showed to the world in our time.”
“I am Lexina, leader of The Ones Who Wait, and these are Elek and Coridan of my order. The machine taught you our language?”
Ts’ang was in front of the guardian, just released from its glow. “To one who knows, the ways of the guardian are many. I have been updated on the current situation. It is most grave. The forces of Aspasia’s Shadow are mobilizing. There is much I do not understand yet, but there is danger.”
“Does the Emperor sleep below?” Lexina asked.
Ts’ang nodded. “He sleeps.”
“Is the Emperor Shi Huangdi actually Artad?”
“In a manner of speaking, he was. The Emperor Shi Huangdi wore the ka of Artad, thus he was Artad.”
“But the real Artad is here?” Lexina asked.
“Yes. He has slept for almost thirteen thousand years.”
Lexina’s body was so tense, it was practically vibrating. “Will you waken him now?”
Ts’ang nodded. “It is time.”
Turcotte lay on his back in the sand looking up at the clear blue desert sky while Fassid nervously paced back and forth just below the crest of the dune. They were six miles from the site of Turcotte’s aborted assassination. Fassid checked his watch for the tenth time in the last five minutes.
“Two minutes before, two minutes after,” Turcotte said.
“What?”
Turcotte was tired, emotionally and physically exhausted. He felt rather detached and calm, an unusual state for him on an exfiltration pickup zone in hostile territory. “Exfiltration window in special ops is two minutes before the appointed, until two minutes after. Four minutes altogether. If the exfil aircraft doesn’t show in that window, you go to the emergency plan. Do you have an emergency plan?”
“Yes,” Fassid said. “I start praying to Allah.”
“Not much of a plan,” Turcotte noted.
“I didn’t have much time,” Fassid said. He looked at his watch. “Our window has just opened.” He cocked his head. “I hear nothing.”
Turcotte couldn’t even add up the number of times on training and real missions when he’d listened for the sound of helicopter blades. He estimated that over half of those occasions he’d been disappointed and left standing on the pickup zone (PZ) as the window closed, left to move to an alternate PZ or into an escape and evasion plan. It was why he wasn’t even getting up, searching the horizon. If the Israeli helicopter showed, fine. If it didn’t, he was certainly better off than he’d been an hour ago when he’d anticipated imminent death. Frankly, he didn’t much care.
“Ah!” Fassid was jumping up and down like a schoolchild as a small helicopter popped up over the sand dune and swung around to come in for a landing forty feet away. It was amazingly quiet, and Turcotte knew why as he recognized the model — the McDonnell-Douglas MDX.
Built around the venerable MD-530 bubble frame, the MDX was on the cutting edge, incorporating NOTAR — no tail rotor — technology, thus eliminating the largest producer of noise on helicopters: the small tail rotor had to rotate at much higher speeds than the main blades. Instead of a tail rotor, compressed air was ejected from the side of the tail boom to keep the helicopter’s torque in balance.