I parked the van to the right of the jeep which sat on its wheel-rims, the rims buried in the hard clay. The tires had rotted long ago, and the water had washed away the rubber. Wind had sandblasted away the paint and the jeep was caked with reddish rust. Of World War II vintage, the wreck looked not only pathetic but ridiculous. It was something that was but shouldn't be.
Miriam pointed to the right. "Over there," she said. "We can climb to the top over there. That's the way Ahmed and I went. It was only a few months ago."
"I'll get the stuff," I said, putting on my shirt. I went to the rear, strapped on a Luger waist holster, shoved Wilhelmina into the oiled leather and closed the flap. I picked up the carry-all shoulder bag, containing the sextant, the celestial computer, the camera and other equipment, and slipped the strap over my shoulder. I next opened the gun locker and took out the AK-47, the Skorpion machine pistol and two shoulder bags of spare magazines for each weapon. On the other side of me, Miriam, who had opened another locker and had taken out two pairs of Zeiss binoculars, handed me one of the cases, a friendly smile on her sensuous mouth. I gave her the AK-47 assault rifle and the bag filled with spare clips.
She smiled again. "Let's not forget the canteens."
A few minutes later, we were outside the van and headed for the left-side face, Miriam leading the way to a very tiny gully in the slope that was almost perpendicular, a depression only slightly larger than a fifteen-foot wide ditch.
"We'll have to be very careful," Miriam said when we reached the face. "As you can see, there are numerous hand-holds, and the side is not all that steep. But if we grab a loose rock, or step on one, we could fall."
We looked up the face of the wall. To reach the top, we'd have to climb almost two hundred feet. The climb would indeed be dangerous, particularly since we had automatic weapons strapped to our backs and were weighed down with canvas shoulder bags.
The climb took us the better part of an hour, and by the time we pulled ourselves over the top edge, we were dripping sweat and Miriam was exhausted, although the climb had only been a good workout for me.
I saw at once that she had told the truth. The top of the cliff was nothing more than a small plateau filled with enormous granite and limestone boulders partially covered with chalky marl. Surprisingly there were stunted juniper trees growing among the boulders, amidst small bushes of qat, a narcotic plant that is chewed and has an effect similar to marijuana. But I didn't see any camp! To the south was the top of the other wadi wall and more hills. To the east, north and the west were hills and more hills of limestone and granite, many of which were crowned with bizarre shaped pinnacles of soft tufa stone. The openings of caves dotted the bases of many of the hills.
Miriam finished drinking from her canteen. "We've got to go six hundred feet or so to the northwest to see the base," she said. "I'll be ready in a minute."
She screwed the cap on the canteen, pushed back her wide-brimmed straw hat and wiped her forehead with a large silk handkerchief.
It didn't take us long, on the more-or-less level ground, to cover the distance to the edge of the plateau. Before we reached the end, Miriam, who was ten feet in front, motioned for me to get down. We crawled the rest of our way on our hands and knees, finally coming to the very edge and taking positions between two enormous boulders.
"There it is, Nick," Miriam said smugly, "the camp of Mohammed Bashir Karameh. I said I'd lead you to it and I have."
Through the binoculars I could see that the base was much larger than I had imagined, in spite of Miriam's having told me that there were usually three to four hundred men and women at the camp, ninety-nine percent of them terrorists.
I studied the layout, noting each feature. In the center of the camp were the remains of the Tower of Lions. But it wasn't a tower. It was an immense square building of stone, without any roof and with only three stories remaining, half of the south wall in ruins. To the northeast of the tower was a long, low building also built of stone, all of it underneath camouflaged netting. Miriam told me that it was used as a storehouse.
To the southwest were scores of small, mud-built and windowless huts, each with a small opening to permit smoke to escape. Scattered in between and around the huts were tents made of woven black goat fleece, each tent supported by poles that varied in length so that both the top and the side walls sloped. I could see people moving around the tents and the houses, but the distance was too great to see their faces clearly.
What surprised me the most were the vehicles parked side by side underneath a tremendous scattered-leaf pattern netting supported by high poles. Two jeeplike command cars, six L-59 Gronshiv armored cars, a dozen personnel carriers, three of which were half-tracks and also Russian, and two T-54 tanks with 140-millimeter cannons!
I didn't lower the binoculars as I asked Miriam why she hadn't mentioned the armor.
"You didn't ask me!" she said indignantly. "What's the difference? There they are."
"I'm not blind," I snapped. "I'm only wondering why all that heavy stuff is down there."
"I don't know," Miriam shrugged. "You'll have to ask al-Huriya, or one of his aides. Khalil Marras for example."
Suspecting that she was mocking me, I shoved the binoculars into their case, gave her a dirty look and crawled to the rear of the boulder, to the side that could not be seen from the SLA camp below. Miriam crawled to the back of the opposite boulder, a smile on her face. Or was it a smirk?
Down on one knee, I took off the two shoulder bags, opened one and removed the camera and the collapsible tripod. Thirty feet across from me, Miriam took off her sunglasses, lit a cigarette and lazily blew smoke in my direction.
I was about to take the tripod and camera and return to the edge when I caught a brief glimpse of a man, who had reared up from behind a boulder twenty feet to my rear, but had not ducked down fast enough. In that split second, I realized that it was too much of a coincidence for one of the SLA to have just happened along. I'd been had in spades. Miriam Kamel had led me into a trap.
I dropped the camera and tripod, pulled Wilhelmina from her holster and thumbed off the safety. The man I had spotted, realizing I had seen him, jumped up from behind the boulder, a fierce look on his face and a Russian PPsH submachine gun in his hands. I snap-aimed, pulled Wilhelmina's trigger and the Luger cracked, the terrorist jerking from the slug that thudded into his forehead. His eyes open and staring into eternity, he dropped the machine gun and crumpled to the ground.
As if Wilhelmina's sharp crack had been a signal, the other SLA terrorists jumped up from their hiding places behind boulders. I saw in that instant that what they had done was to creep up behind me and Miriam and form a semicircle to our rear. Not having time to count them, I saw only that they were dressed in khaki pants and shirts, wore combat boots and had their heads covered with kaffiyehs. Their weapons were sidearms and automatic weapons.
"Don't kill him!" Miriam yelled. "Al-Huriya wants him alive!"
I didn't have one chance in a million of escaping, but I was determined to put up a hell of a fight before they chopped me apart.
The terrorists, the white neck cloths of their kaffiyehs flying, charged toward me. I rushed toward the nearest SLA killer and cut him down with a flying doubled-legged piston kick. At the last moment, I straightened out my legs so that my thigh muscles had a chance to get into the act. My feet crashed into the man's midsection and he screamed.
While the man went flying backward, I spun my body around and dropped facedown, breaking my fall with my feet and left hand. My surprised move had disorganized the terrorists, their momentary confusion giving me the opportunity to jump to my feet and make Wilhelmina snarl. She did, twice, and two more men cried out in pain. One went down with a bullet through the groin, all the gasping sounds a requiem to his final seconds of life. The second man fell against another terrorist, my bullet, hitting him at an angle, having gone through his lungs.