Arching upward as much as I could, I hooked my feet behind my captor's ankles and jerked. The man's feet flew out from under him and he fell backward, trying to let go of me in order to catch himself. He failed. He crashed to the ground on his back. I fell on top of him.
I bounced to my feet and noticed from the corner of my eye that Solomon had jerked a thick-bladed Syrian knife from a felled terrorist and was slashing left and right, a look of maniacal rage on his dirty face.
My ex-captor was now trying desperately to get to his feet. He intended to make a full turnover, then scramble backward away from me. He never got the chance. In a flash, when he was halfway through the roll, I jumped on his back, reached down, grabbed both his legs by the ankles and pulled violently, up and backward. I heard a loud cracking sound and a scream cut short. The man's spine had snapped.
I jumped to my feet in time to avoid a straight left fist jab thrown by a huge bearded man who had a face like a bull and was snorting in rage and hate. I ducked, grabbed the man's wrist and flipped him upside down and over, while still retaining my hold on his arm.
He tried to pull back, but I jerked him to his feet, slammed him in the bridge of the nose, then slipped an arm through the V of his legs and threw him headlong into another terrorist who was trying to draw a pistol from a holster on his hip. Both men went down in a tangle of arms, legs and curses, falling to the side of another man who had stumbled and was now attempting to pull a Magnum revolver from a shoulder holster.
Knowing I had to move fast or die, I streaked across the short distance to the three men. The one with the Magnum was my first concern. I kicked him hard in the forearm, hoping I had broken the bone. He howled and tried to draw back. I slammed my heel into his forehead at the same time that the other man, who had been drawing an automatic, succeeded in pulling the pistol from its holster and managed to twist it upward toward me. I jumped sideways, he pulled the trigger and the bullet struck another Syrian who had been trying to come in at Solomon from the left. I leaped forward, kicked the pistol from the man and mashed in his face with my heel.
Too late I realized that I had been careless; I felt a silken sash fall over the front of my head and slide over my throat. For a moment, panic exploded in my brain. Whoever had crept up behind me put a knee into the small of my back and started to tighten the sash. I kicked backward, my right heel slamming into the side of the man's left kneecap. The Arab guerrilla yelled in pain, relaxed his crossover stranglehold and reflexively dropped his knee from my back, his movements enabling me to step back closer to him. I was about to give him a terrible elbow jab when he gasped, arched forward and fell on his face. Solomon had thrown the Ghizu, the blade buried in the man's back to the hilt.
There were still a few men left, but Solomon and I didn't get the chance to tangle with them. A submachine gun roared from the front opening of the tent and the remaining terrorists dropped one by one.
Lev Wymann stood in the entrance, smoke curling from the muzzle of an SFR-10 Israeli Galil in his hands. "I sort of figured that the two of you might need some help." He looked around at the bodies on the ground. "But from the looks of things, I guess you were doing all right on your own."
"Don't kid yourself," Solomon panted. "We couldn't have lasted much longer." He looked at me. "That bastard Karameh figured we'd come here. It was a neat trap. But I wonder where he is?"
I moved to one side, my eyes searching for the table and the chest.
"What are you looking for, Carter?" Wymann asked.
"A couple of good friends of mine!"
The two Israelis glanced at each other.
"Not among the Syrians, surely!" exclaimed Solomon.
I soon found the chest, lying on its side. I knelt down, put it upright and opened the rounded lid. There was Wilhelmina and Hugo. I shoved Wilhelmina into her holster on my hip and strapped Hugo to the inside of my right forearm.
Lev Wymann smiled. "Some 'friends! he said with a laugh.
"You'd better believe it," I said. I stepped toward the entrance. "Let's get back to the tank. I have a hunch that the Hawk and his lieutenants are hiding where they think we'd never dream of looking."
"Where's that?" Wymann asked.
"The tower ruins."
Chapter Twelve
Once the three of us were outside the tent, we saw that Cham Elovitz had opened the hatch above his head and was standing up and looking at us.
"It's about time," he said, his eyes going to me. "If the SLA had killed you and Ben, we were going to run over the tent and flatten them like pancakes. What's our next move?"
"The Tower ruins," I said. "I think that's where the Hawk is hiding. There isn't any place else he could be, unless he's somewhere among the bodies."
Solomon, Wymann and I climbed the rear glacis plate deck and entered the T-54 through the commander's cupola hatch.
The tank rolled across the wreckage and headed for the Tower of Lions. Through the wide-angle periscope, I stared at the monstrous pile of stones, the structure looking even more forbidding in the deep twilight.
I didn't expect what happened next. I don't think any of us did.
A BTR-40 personnel carrier seemed to jump out at full throttle from behind the north side of the ruins, its engine roaring. I estimated its speed at roughly forty m.p.h. Right behind it came an L-59Gronshiv armored car, the gunner rotating the forward turret and its 50mm cannon toward us.
Mohammed Karameh!
"Carter! Do you see them!" shouted Solomon, who was watching through the commander's scope. "Blast that carrier! Blast it!"
I lowered the 140mm gun, my fingers slippery on the handle of the wheel, and pressed down on the right pedal, rotating the turret slightly. There was a loud crash from the front of the tank. The armored car had sent a 50mm shell at us. The enemy gunner knew he couldn't hurt us because of the T-54's massive armor plate, but I assumed he was trying to distract us just enough to give the Hawk time to escape.
My ears ringing, I turned the calibration knob and double-checked the reticle pattern. I pressed the firing button and the 140mm gun thundered. Several hundred feet ahead, there was a big bang and the gray vehicle turned into a brief but violent burst of red and orange, the explosion sending huge chunks of the car flying out in all directions.
"Damn it. Carter!" Solomon yelled in disgust. "You should have aimed at the carrier!"
I swung the turret to the right while Lev Wymann jerked out the used shell casing, shoved another AP shell into the gun, closed the breech and locked the cam-lever.
I was too late. By the time I started to zero in the gun, the personnel carrier had raced behind a low mound of granite.
Risenberg's deep voice, coming from the driver's compartment, was full of puzzlement. "Carter, why in hell didn't you fire that round at the carrier? Karameh wouldn't be in an armored car! He knows we'd try to destroy the car first because of its fifty mil gun."
"Turn us around and get us to one of the personnel carriers," I said. "We're ditching the tank. I didn't fire at the carrier because I knew that if I missed, I wouldn't have a chance to fire at the armored car. It would have moved behind the ridge before I could have smacked it. We…"
"The hell with the armored car!" Risenberg cut in angrily. "We've lost the Hawk. He's the one we want dead."
"Shut up and think for a moment," I snapped. "The main road out of camp is to the north. Karameh and his people took the narrow road to the east. I don't know what he has in mind, but this tank can t outrun a personnel carrier. We've got to use a carrier. I didn't want that armored car and its fifty millimeter job banging away at us in a carrier. We wouldn't have had a chance."