During those few seconds as we stared at each other, screams of excruciating agony poured through the window. It seemed the terrorists had hoisted the man being tortured in the stork position, all the way off the ground. His arms, bound behind his back, had to support his full weight, which had to have dislocated his shoulders.
"Who are you?" I asked, assuming that the three men being tortured had been a part of this ragged group.
I saw that my use of English surprised the men; just the same, they continued to regard me with an animosity that grew by the seconds.
Staring defiantly at me, one of the men stood up and said in slightly accented English, "Go tell Karameh that sending you in here was a waste of time. We don't have any secrets to tell, and if we did, we wouldn't tell them."
Pressed for time and needing proof of who they were before I made an effort to get to Pierre, I said harshly in Arabic, "I am convinced that Allah is the syphilitic son of a whore."
Very often cultural instinct forces one to react faster than conscious, controlled thought. If the men were Moslem, rage should flicker briefly in their eyes before they caught themselves in realization of how I had tricked them with the filthy insult. But their eyes revealed only puzzlement, indicating that they had not understood what I had said. Rage was absent.
Evidently the man who was standing had understood, for he was actually smiling, as if amused. He turned and looked down at some of the others who were watching me with a mixture of contempt and bold disdain.
This stupid SLA nut thinks he can trick us by pretending to insult his precious Allah! I'd think Karameh would have more sense."
It was my turn to be mildly astonished. The man had spoken Hebrew. Before I could say anything, the man on his feet smiled mockingly at me and said in Arabic, "We agree with you. We think Allah is exactly what you said he is!"
Rapidly losing patience, I said in Hebrew, "If you're Israelis, how did you get here and why are you in such good physical condition? You look like pigs, but you don't look starved!"
The man in front of me stared, his mouth slack, his eyes uncertain. Five more of the men got to their feet, one of them, a tall man with a bitter face, looking intently at me but saying to the others in Hebrew. "Maybe he isn't an SLA agent?"
"None of you have answered my questions!" I said harshly. "I don't have time to play games. In less than an hour those sadists are going to make me wish I had never been born."
The man who had first gotten to his feet said with a trace of friendly earnestness. "My name is Josef Risenberg. We were in the Israeli armed forces but were captured by the SLA when we went into southern Lebanon a year ago. Originally there were thirty-one of us. Once in a while Karameh exchanges one of us for one of his rank and file members. That's why the SLA hasn't deprived us of food. You can't exchange dead men, and Karameh knows that if he starves us, our people at home will do the same to his men. But who are you?"
"I'm Nick Carter." I said. "How I got here is a tale too long to tell right now. Let's just say I'm the guy who's going to get us out of here, unless you prefer to stay here and rot in your own filth."
Some of the Israelis, still suspicious of me, glanced in silence at each other.
"You don't look like the Messiah to me. Carter! Risenberg was highly skeptical. "And that's who it would take to get us out of this rat-hole!"
"I'm not the Redeemer either, but I have a plan!"
"You're serious! You're really serious!" There was hope in Risenberg's voice, and his words were a kind of plea.
"What's behind the other two doors in the corridor in front?"
"The room on the north side is used for interrogation. That's where they tortured the two who are unconscious. We think they're with Israeli Intelligence. They have never said and we have never asked them. The door on the west end opens to a guard room. "His voice more excited, rang with hope. "If we could get inside that guard room, we'd have a chance. One wall is lined with assault rifles and machine guns."
"A chance!" another man said. "What are you talking about, Josef? "Where can we go? For God's sake, we're in the middle of hundreds of terrorists!"
The man got a reply from one of his fellow Israelis. "We'd be better off to die fighting, taking some of those psychopaths with us, than to live like this, to live worse than their dogs." The man got to his feet and stared at me. "I'm with you. Carter!"
"Listen, all of you," I said. "We do have a place to go — Jordan. There's a lot of armored stuff out there, including two Russian tanks. On the way over here, I saw shells being loaded into one tank. Once we're out of here, if we can get to those tanks, we can blow hell out of this camp, then get across the border into Jordan — at least in theory.
"We know about the tanks," Risenberg said. "For days the guards have been taunting us with how the SLA is going to attack a Jordanian village and leave behind evidence to point a finger at the PLO. That madman Karameh wants to create internal dissension among the Israeli haters. In this respect, I hope the son of a bitch is successful."
The man standing next to Risenberg looked at me as though I were stark raving mad. "But we can't get out of here! The guards always keep their guns trained on us whenever they enter. Besides, you're handcuffed."
"Tell me something I don't know!" I said. "I've less than forty-five minutes to get out of these bracelets before the guards come for me. If…"
"You've less time than that before the first group of guards come in," Risenberg cut in, looking at a shaft of light slanting through one of the windows on the north side. "The guards bring us the evening meal at five. Right now, it's about four-thirty."
"How do you know?"
"The way the light slants through the north-side windows. I developed the system to keep my mind active." He went over to the north side of the room, tapped a stone with the tip of his foot and looked at me. "This stone is five o'clock. See where the one column of sunlight ends, where it hits the floor? Right now, I'd say it's between four-thirty and four-forty. But it's like Jacob said, how are you going to get out of those cuffs?"
"Watch me!" I glanced at the door, then said to Risenberg. "Go over to the door and keep an eye on the corridor. If any guards pop out, let me know."
Mystified, Risenberg went over to the door and looked through the tiny square opening. The rest of the Israelis stared at me. I went to work. I wriggled my cuffed hands underneath my shirt, squirming them past my belt, inside my pants and shorts until they reached my genitals. With a slight grunt, I yanked the small, slender tube taped behind my scrotum and slid it into my fingers. Hurriedly, I inched my hands upward and back outside my pants, holding the tube that contained Pierre tightly.
The Israelis, grouped around me, watched with fascination and amazement.
"Can we help?" one of them asked.
"No, I must do it," I said. Actually there wasn't anything they could have done, even if it hadn't been for deadly little Pierre, so small he was only one-third the size of a marble. It wasn't his size but what he contained that made him so extremely dangerous — hydro-chlorsarsomasine, a nerve gas that killed faster than pure hydrocyanic acid. Anyhow, I could work faster by touch alone than by taking time to tell the men what to do.
I placed the section of the tube containing Pierre on the floor, retaining the other half in my left hand. With the thumb and forefinger of my other hand, I tilted the tube and reached for the lock picks inside, hoping desperately that my fingers wouldn't be too numb to do the job. I selected a Number Six lock pick and began working on the left cuff.