The road back to the airport was clogged with soldiers returning from a wild night in Algiers. Hunter was stretched out on the rear seat of the jeep, trying to relax before the return flight to RAF Gibraltar. Up front, Heath and Raleigh were enthusiastically discussing the forces they had just hired. They were much relieved. The first very important step had been completed. Hunter was only mildly troubled by the fact that he hadn’t been able to uncover any inside information about Lucifer. He admitted to himself that he was getting caught up in the Brit’s Great Suez Adventure.
Hunter sensed trouble just seconds before the rocket-propelled grenade landed in front of the jeep.
He had been able to sit up and yank Heath around the neck, causing the British driver to hit the brakes and thus avoiding what would have been a direct hit on their vehicle. The grenade exploded ten feet in front of them, filling the air with deadly shrapnel, which killed several soldiers unlucky enough to be walking on the road.
An instant after the grenade landed, Hunter, Heath, and Raleigh were out of the jeep and under cover in a trench next to the road. A cliff on the left side of the roadway looked to be the most likely spot for the ambushers to hide. Hunter had his M-16 up and ready, his extraordinary eyes scanning the ledges for any sign of the attackers. All around them, hungover soldiers, their weapons also at ready, had also taken cover, none of them sure who had fired the grenade and why.
Hunter had a couple good guesses …
“Someone up there doesn’t like us,” Heath said, his own 9mm automatic pistol at the ready.
“Either we’ve been betrayed by someone at the meeting, or Lucifer’s people heard we were in town,” Raleigh said.
“Could be someone trying to make a little extra cash,” Hunter said. “After all, the person who turns in my hide is in for a billion dollars.”
Just then he heard the distinctive whoosh of an RPG being fired.
“Here comes another one!” Hunter yelled loud enough so everyone in earshot could hear him.
Another shell crashed down three seconds later, landing twenty feet from the jeep and sending out another cloud of flaming shrapnel. Thanks to Hunter’s warning, no one was hurt in the second blast.
An instant after the shell exploded, Hunter was up and firing his M-16 towards a point two-thirds of the way up the cliff. He had detected a telltale puff of smoke from the grenade launcher and was now spraying the point with tracer-laced M-16 bullets. The two Brits and many of the soldiers caught along the road did the same thing. But, at the same moment, a powerful machine gun opened up from another part of the rocky bluff. Then another and another.
Within seconds, a full-fledged firefight had broken out.
Hunter still concentrated his fire on the point where he knew the RPG launcher was. After his fifth barrage, he heard something hit home. There was a loud explosion on the side of the cliff and a rain of rocks and metal showered down onto the roadway. Hunter’s fire had not only found the RPG operators, it had hit their ammunition. Two bodies came down the bluff in the small avalanche, both landing with a bloody splat in the middle of the road.
The machine-gun fire intensified. Still, Hunter had to find out who the attackers were. To the shock and amazement of the two British pilots, he was up and running toward one of the attackers who had fallen from the cliff. With bullets splashing all around him, the Wingman dragged the fallen ambusher back to the trench.
Even Hunter was amazed that the man was still breathing, though he had only seconds to go. His body was cracked and bleeding from a number of points. The pilot studied the man. He was wearing a nondescript black uniform, with a turban and a cloth covering most of his face. Each breath the man took resulted in a exhalation of blood, which spurted out of the cloth covering his mouth. Still, his eyes were open.
“Who are you?” Hunter demanded. “Who is your boss?”
The man actually managed a laugh. “Hunter … ” he gasped. “You fool … ”
His eyes then went up into his head. A gush of blood came out of his mouth and he was dead.
Hunter, surprised that the man knew him by name, slowly unwrapped the bloody cloth that covered most of the dead man’s face. He recognized the man’s features right away. It was el-Fauzi, the man he had met at the Casablanca control tower.
“Do you know him?” Heath asked, crawling over to Hunter and the dead man.
“Believe it or not, I do,” the pilot replied, searching the body. “He led me to a character named Lord Lard in Casablanca. Lard’s the guy who told me to come here, to Algiers. They must have been setting me up.”
“That’s what it looks like, old boy,” Heath said, ducking away from a barrage of machine-gun fire. “But the question is: were they just after that billion-dollar bounty or are they allies of Lucifer?”
Hunter looked at el-Fauzi’s broken body.
“Maybe I’ll never know,” he said to himself.
The fire from the cliff intensified. Hunter pushed aside the body and concentrated on the rest of the attackers. There were spits of fire coming from at least a dozen locations on the side of the cliff as well as at its peak. Meanwhile, many of the mercenaries who happened to be on the fringes of the ambush had withdrawn, leaving only Hunter, Heath, Raleigh, and three bystanders square in the line of fire.
The good news was that one of those bystanders had a radio …
Fifteen minutes later, Hunter heard the chopper approaching from the west. It was a Westland Lynx, the British-built helicopter originally built for antishipping operations. As the copter came into view, Hunter could clearly see its bright yellow-and-green markings as well as the half-dozen TOW missiles jimmy-rigged on its belly.
“Humdingo came through for us,” Heath said to Hunter.
They had crawled over to the mercenary who happened to be carrying the radio and called back to the Algiers airport control tower. For the promise of a bag of silver, a runner carried a detailed message to Humdingo, who was on duty guarding the F-16 and the Tornados. Humdingo then arranged to have one of the airport’s many free-lance helicopter gunships fly out to the site of the ambush.
The fire from the cliff had intensified in the ensuing time, but now it was redirected when the helicopter arrived. The Lynx ignored the barrage of bullets being thrown up at it by the ambushers and, in workmanlike fashion, swooped in and deposited a TOW missile directly on the top of the cliff. The resulting explosion caused a small landslide — two more bodies landing on the road amidst the debris.
The Lynx circled around and fired two more missiles into the side of the bluff. Again, the two explosions caused minor avalanches as well as three tumbling bodies. The chopper made two more passes, both times firing its dual machine guns. Even above the racket of the chopper blades, Hunter could hear the shells puncturing flesh. One more TOW missile strike and all fire from the cliff ceased. The attack was over.
The trapped soldiers emerged from the trench just as the Lynx was setting down on the road. Heath made a point of giving a bag of silver to each of the unlucky mercenaries trapped in the ambush, including a half-dozen gold coins in the bag of the man who had been carrying the lifesaving radio.
The mercenaries went on their way as Hunter, Heath, and Raleigh approached the Lynx. Humdingo himself stepped out of the aircraft, his grin even wider than before.
“Heath, old man,” he said in perfect Queen’s English. You are lucky you have such a good friend as Humdingo in Algiers.”
“Amen, chief,” Heath said, with much relief.
The Lynx pilot — he looked like a Greek to Hunter — stepped out of the chopper and approached Heath.