The remaining Syrians closed in on me. Ducking the barrel of a machine gun swung at my head, I was about to put a 9mm hollow point into another of my attackers when a powerful hand grabbed my right wrist and an arm slid around my throat. I used the point of my left elbow to smash into the man's ribs. He howled and fell to one side, pulled his arm from my neck.
As the man holding my right wrist twisted Wilhelmina away from me, I used my left hand to jab him in the hollow of the throat, at the same time kicking backward to flatten the stomach of a man trying to slam me between the shoulder blades with the barrel of his sub-gun.
But I was fighting a losing battle. Again I was grabbed — both arms this time — and pulled in opposite directions.
I had been in this sort of fix before and knew what the two Syrians were thinking: that there wasn't anything I could do. But with my legs and feet I could do plenty. I kicked up with my right leg and drove my foot underneath the chin of the man holding my right arm. A long, low sound of agony jumped from his throat and he went down, unconscious.
The man holding my left arm thought that he was going to get help from a man darting at me to my right. They both got a surprise! With my left foot I stomped down as hard as I could on the right instep of the man hanging on to my arm, and felt his tarsus bone splinter. Immediately I delivered a pulverizing blow to the other man's abdomen. He gasped loudly, his eyes bugged out and he became as helpless as a newborn baby.
All of a sudden, someone knocked my right leg out from under me, and I started to fall to the right. Before I could recover my balance, a fist slammed against the left side of my head and a man threw himself on my back and kicked my left leg out from under me. Helpless but still struggling, I went down, the weight of the man's body pinning me, sharp stones cutting into my face. Something smashed against the back of my head. Stars exploded inside my head and a black velvet curtain dropped over my brain.
I had the horrible feeling that I was in a whirlpool and drowning! The nightmare then became reality and, as I regained consciousness, I realized that the «drowning» had been caused by water thrown into my face. The cobwebs vanished from my mind and I found that I was on my back, my wrists handcuffed behind me, staring up at a circle of hate-filled faces. Except Miriam's: Her expression was one of contempt and amusement.
"It was a good try, Nick," she smirked. She tapped her cigarette, dropping ash in my face. "But as you Americans are fond of saying, 'you can't win them all. »
"I really haven't lost this one yet," I shot back at her. "The game is still not over." I noticed that Hugo had been unstrapped from my arm. Without him and Wilhelmina, I felt almost naked. But not quite. I still had Pierre, my gas bomb.
"It's over for you, Nick," Miriam said matter-of-factly. "You're a dead man, dear. It will be up to you how we kill you, either quickly or very slowly and painfully." She reached out and grabbed the forearm of a SLA sadist who had been about to kick me in the ribs. "Stop! We want to keep our guest in good health," she sneered, looking back down at me. "The stronger he is, the longer we'll be able to torture him."
She nodded to two of the terrorists and they reached underneath my arms and jerked me to my feet.
"Clever the way you lured me here," I said to her. "But it seems to me that you and your people went to a lot of trouble. The SLA could just as easily have grabbed me back in Damascus."
"Yes, we could have," she said lazily, stepping away from me, "but we had no way of knowing if AXE or Hamosad had agents watching to see if you and I left the shop. We couldn't take the risk. You and I had to leave in the van. It was convenient enough, since al-Huriya wanted you brought here, to his base."
"Oh, now I feel honored," I said with a chuckle. Suddenly without a warning of any kind, one of the terrorists, a skinny man with a long blue-red scar on one cheek, slapped me hard across the face. Evidently the man hadn't liked my last remark.
Pretending to ignore the stinging pain, I looked at Miriam, who acted as if nothing had happened. "Yeah, honored," I quipped, "even if Karameh didn't send me an engraved invitation."
"Don't flatter yourself, Nick." She was no longer smiling. "We wanted any agent that AXE or Hamosad might send. I will say that we were hoping it would be an agent of AXE and we were hoping that the agent would be you. Naturally we could only wait and see."
One of the men, a heavyset thug with a small beard and beady eyes, spoke to Miriam. From the respectful tone of his voice, I deduced that she was one of Karameh's top people.
"What about our dead comrades?" the man asked her, glaring at me and then looking around him at the bodies on the ground. Of the others that I had wrecked, the man I had hit in the abdomen was sitting on a small rock holding his stomach; the man whose ribs I had broken could hardly stand.
"We'll leave them here," Miriam told the beady-eyed man. "Men from camp can come back and pick them up later. The important thing now is to get this stupid AXE agent to al-Huriya. How far away are the jeeps?"
"About a mile to the north," the man replied. "We didn't want to take any chances of his discovering us."
"Yes, that was wise," Miriam agreed. "Very well, we'll go." She turned to another man. "Halif, you go back down to the wadi and drive the van."
We began the walk to the jeeps, Miriam beside me, to my left. To my right, a Syrian kept me covered with a Stechkin machine pistol. Behind me were two more men who, every now and then, poked me in the back with the muzzles of assault rifles.
"There is just one thing I don't understand, I said to Miriam. I knew there had to be a beeper; there wasn't any way. "How did your people know we'd be at this spot today. We could have had engine trouble and have been a day late. We'd have been here earlier if it hadn't been for the bandit attack."
"I thought you would have guessed, Nick," laughed Miriam. "There's a hidden transmitter in the van that emits a steady pulsating signal for tracking purposes, in this case for thirteen miles. You're an expert with such devices. You figure out the rest."
"Someone followed us from Damascus," I said. "Your people never lost track of us."
"Give the man a cigar," she said. "It was easy for my comrades to deduce when we would reach the wadi." She laughed again, reached into her pocket, pulled out a cigarette lighter and held it up for me to see. "Before we began the climb, I activated this. It was easy for the men to keep track of us."
I knew that part of the lighter was a «beeper» of short range.
"You see, Nick, we Arabs aren't half as stupid as you Westerners think we are…"
We continued in silence, and the thought came to me that the great charm of fanaticism is that, like love, it's a great simplifier. It combines the virtue of explaining nothing with the vice of interpreting everything.
I didn't underestimate my position. I was in the hands of the most dangerous fanatics in the world.
Chapter Eight
As the jeeps roared into camp, I knew how the early Christians in ancient Rome must have felt when they were about to be tossed to the lions. Nonetheless, my apprehension didn't interfere with my noting the various features of the base. I saw that there was another road leading from the camp, other than the main route that led to the one Miriam told me had been blocked by a landslide. This new road was smaller in width and seemed to lead off into the hills.