Grateful that Risenberg was a trained fighter, I looked over at him as he crouched by the doorway. I saw only determination in his eyes. "Shove your barrel around the edge and trigger off a five round burst, then I'll go in. Count five and follow."
A moment before Risenberg dropped to one knee, thrust the machine gun around the edge of the doorway and fired, I heard the two AK-47s roar. The SLA was attacking, and we hadn't even gotten off to a good start.
Hunched low, I streaked into the guardroom and darted to the left. Within that fraction of a second, I caught a very brief glimpse of crates, a wall-full of weapons, a table, chairs, and heads and torsos popping up — four, five or more terrorists! I wasn't sure; I didn't have time to count.
I fired on the move, from left to right, the PPsH roaring and shuddering in my hands. One man let out a short yell when several 7.65mm bullets punched him in the chest. I caught a flash of another man's face dissolving in a messy shower of flesh and blood as four or five high velocity slugs exploded his head.
Almost to the window of the south wall, I skidded to a stop and dropped in time to avoid a stream of bullets coming from behind crates on the northeast side of the room. A slug buzzed so close to the left side of my head I thought I could hear it whispering obscenely at me. Another bullet tore through my shirt and grazed my left shoulder, the pain making me angry.
To my right, while I swung my weapon toward the northeast side of the room, another machine gun began chattering — Risenberg's. A quick glance showed that the Israeli fighter had come in low and was raking the tops of the crates with a deadly fire, his bursts having already killed one man who lay face down across one of the large wooden boxes.
Toward my side of the room, three Syrians rose up as a unit to fire. The firefight had progressed with the speed of several bolts of lightning and I reasoned that the three had assumed I was either dead or too wounded to be of any danger to them. As a result, they had crawled behind the crates to the northwest side, no doubt thinking they could rear up and splatter Risenberg before he could swing his muzzle around to them.
For a moment, one of the men, seeing me, opened his mouth in surprise. That split second enabled me to bore a hole through his chest, the impact sending him sprawling all the way back to the north wall.
The last two terrorists hesitated, uncertain of whether to fire at me or Risenberg. The one with the mustache, so long it drooped past his chin, decided on me. The second man chose Risenberg.
I ducked to one side an instant before my attacker pulled the trigger, ignoring the chain of slugs that sliced the air a foot from me and opening up with my own PPsH. The terrorist's head wobbled like a top as my stream of 7.65s damn near decapitated him. Risenberg hadn't been much kinder to the man trying to neutralize him.
Feeling that I was definitely having a bad day, I saw that the rack on the east wall was filled with AK-47 assault rifles and PPsH machine guns, each weapon containing a forty-round «banana» shaped magazine.
Firing was still coming from the hallway, in reply to the SLA people from the outside.
"Tell them in the hall that it's all clear in here," I yelled at Risenberg, who already was snatching AK-47s from the rack.
"I doubt if any of us make it to the tanks," he said calmly, tossed me an AK, then turned and ran into the hallway. I pulled back the cocking knob of the Russian assault rifle, with the thought that it was one of the finest weapons in the world — far more accurate at a longer range than the Israeli UZI, the British Sten, or the U. S. M3-A1 grease gun. Even when rarely cleaned and firing corroded ammunition, it continues to be an effective weapon.
I hurried to the south side window, the only one in the room, and cautiously looked out. The Arabs were firing from the north side of the Tower of Lions, but why weren't slugs coming through this window? Looking around the room, I soon discovered the reason — grenades! Risenberg and I had been sitting on one big time bomb. We were lucky that in killing the terrorists we hadn't blown ourselves to smithereens. The SLA terrorists outside were not firing through the window because they obviously didn't want to destroy costly and valuable equipment.
Israelis poured into the room and began grabbing AK-47s from the rack. 'Take as many as you can carry," I said. "I'll explain later."
"We're as good as dead," muttered Karl Nierman. "It's over two hundred feet to the tanks."
Privately agreeing with him, I didn't comment as we left the room, our arms loaded with AKs and PPsH sub-guns, and rushed out into the hall where DuSold and Wymann were still firing two and three round bursts. Risenberg and Keifer gave them each an AK-47 and I said, "Listen, all of you. I'll tell you how we can do it, the only way that will give us half a chance."
"There's eleven of us and hundreds of them!" Cham Elovitz was skeptical.
"But only fifty or sixty of them are firing." I quickly pointed out. "Three of us can fire from each side of the doorway. We'll rake the tower and anything else where we see an enemy. The moment the six stop firing, five of us will make a dash for it and set up for the other six…"
"Let's get on with it," Ben Sahl said. He got down on one knee to the side of DuSold and John Ivinmetz took a position to the side of him. On the opposite side of the door, Jacob Keifer and Cham Elovitz took positions by Lev Wymann.
The rest of us cocked our weapons, listening to the clattering of empty shell casings falling to the floor. The cordite fumes were so thick they stung our eyes.
Then the six stopped firing and, taking a deep breath, I leaped through the door, expecting at any moment to feel the hammerlike blow of a bullet.
Chapter Ten
We didn't have time to aim, the four Israelis zigzagging with me across the open space. All we could do was snap off short bursts at the north side of the Tower of Lions and in the general direction of the southeast corner from which other SLA members were firing. The other six came behind us, racing in a crooked pattern similar to our own.
It was pure luck that we were still alive, although slugs were sizzling all around us. I felt a bullet tear through my pants at my left inner thigh; another tore through the rolled up sleeve of my right arm. Still a third barely nicked the rubber heel of my right boot.
But no man's luck lasts forever. We heard Jacob Keifer cry out when we were almost to the northeast corner of the Tower. We all knew that he was more than wounded; now that he was down the SLA would chop him to pieces. And we saw, too, why the men underneath the arbor had stopped screaming: all three had been hacked to pieces with knives, flies and insects by the millions now feeding on their corpses.
Now and then we leaped over the dead bodies of SLA terrorists that DuSold and Wymann had killed from the south doorway. The ten of us, panting, raced past the east wall of the Tower, triggering off short bursts at the few windows and at scattered groups of terrorists running ahead of us. Then we were nine as Hymie DuSold jerked from the impact of a slug and fell to the hot, hard ground… we continued past the southeast corner of the ruins, some of us raking the Syrians crouched there, the rest of us firing at the killers within the vicinity of the line of armor. The guerrillas reacted out of sheer panic, not expecting us to get as far as we had.
I bent low, exchanging my empty AK-47 for a machine gun lying beside a dead terrorist. The sub-gun was a 9-millimeter Swiss MP Neuhausen. When I was captured I noticed that the enemy carried a variety of weapons from different nations. To me this was evidence that the SLA had wide contacts with revolutionary groups all over the world.