Now was the time to move. Trying to stay close to the larger boulders of granite, I crawled on my hands and knees for six or seven yards, then jumped up and started running a crooked course to the north. Behind me, several grenades exploded in the vicinity of my previous position, the detonations ringing up and down the ridge.
I spotted Elovitz dodging to my left, thirty feet in front of me, and yelled loudly in Hebrew, "Cham! I'm in front of you."
I knew I was taking a chance by calling out. Proof came a few moments after I snuggled down into a rounded out depression close to a clearing which was actually the top of a mammoth slab of limestone. I estimated that a hundred enemy slugs stabbed into the rocks around me, the racket of ricochets a crescendo of screeching whines.
I looked for a more secure position, but saw none. There was, however, a ditchlike fissure that ran parallel to me. As far as I could detect in the half-darkness, it changed to a diagonal route ten feet to the south. I edged closer to the large crack in the rock and looked down. I could see by the moonlight striking one side that the ditch was less than five feet deep. Perfect for an escape route. Dropping into the crevice feet first I moved toward the north and hoped that if Risenberg and Elovitz heard me, they wouldn't shoot before they looked. The sound of feet on loose stone just around a bend in the ditch startled me. I stopped and listened. The noise stopped.
"Carter? Is that you?" Elovitz whispered loudly.
"I'm ahead of you," I said relieved. "I'll be there in a minute."
"Hold it," Elovitz ordered. "Give our names."
I smiled at their common-sense caution. "Josef Risenberg and Cham Elovitz — the two jokers suffering through this with me."
"Come on," Risenberg called back with a half-laugh.
I hurried forward, rounded the bend and soon had made contact with the two Israelis, who were as dirty and sweat-soaked as I.
"The two of you took a chance calling out that way," I admonished. "I could have been the enemy, but I'm glad you did. How many have you neutralized?"
"More than a dozen that we know of," Risenberg whispered. "The damned fools charged right at us. Fanatics, everyone of them." He gave a cynical snort. "How about you?"
"At least that many. Have you seen anything of Karameh or the Kamels?"
The two Israelis shook their heads to the negative.
"We didn't have time to look at faces," Elovitz said. "I think a few of them were women, but we didn't check. What's our next move?"
"We can't cross the open space without exposing ourselves to enemy gunfire," I said. "Let's try to get behind whoever is left and finish them off. And watch out for slugs from the carrier. There still might be someone manning the heavy machine gun."
We moved along the inside of the ditch for another thirty or forty feet, then stopped and listened, all three of us worried about the silence. What small animals were on the hilltop had been frightened by the gunfire, and the unnatural stillness was unnerving. The SLA had lost us. But neither did we know where they were.
Discreetly I poked my head over the top of the ditch and looked around. On one side, all I saw were rocks of various sizes and shapes. On the other side was a large open area. What would the SLA expect us to do? They knew we wouldn't be stupid enough to try to cross the open space. They could only guess. They had to realize that we were in the general vicinity. All right. They'd try to encircle us. We had to get behind them before they succeeded.
"Let's try for those rocks, " I suggested.
The three of us crawled out of the ditch and began to creep along the scattered stones, keeping as low as possible. I pulled up short at the sight of the three bodies ahead, lying to one side of a slab rock.
"Careful," I whispered. "It could be a trap."
"I think they're three of the pigs we killed," Elovitz whispered. "I recognize the Safari hat one of them is wearing."
With our weapons pointed downward, we approached the corpses. We soon discovered that one of the bodies was that of a young woman in her early twenties, her dead, dark eyes staring up at the stars. There was a holster around her waist and a Stechkin machine pistol in the bloody leather. I pulled out the gun, stuffed it into my own belt and glanced at Elovitz who was searching the other two bodies while Risenberg kept watch.
Elovitz held up the wrist of one slain terrorist and whispered, "Look, this one is wearing a Seiko chronograph!"
"Take it," I said. "It may come in handy."
We continued forward, came to an enormous boulder, and started to edge around it, our hearts pounding with tension. It happened so very quickly that the four Syrians, coming from the other side, were as surprised as we were. The seven of us had practically collided with each other.
I was the first to react; I swung up my StG and fired. The dozen hollow-pointed slugs almost cut the first killer in two, then continued on their way through empty air. Simultaneously, Elovitz and Risenberg leaped to one side and rushed forward to meet the three other SLA members before any of them could throw slugs at us. I heard a scraping sound above me, looked up and saw the surprised face of still another terrorist whose body was sliding toward me, his arms and legs moving frantically as he tried to brake his fall. Apparently he had crawled across the top of the rock and had been getting ready to spray slugs down on top of me when he slipped on the marblelike basalt. I didn't have time to duck. He came down on top of me, losing his gun, the impact of his fall forcing my own rifle from my hands.
"Dog infidel!" he snarled and, trying to keep me pinned down, pulled a Ghizu from his tangled waistcoat.
I jabbed a thumb into his left eye and somehow managed to get my hand around his wrist, succeeding in keeping the point of the knife away from my throat. Together, we rolled over on our sides, then struggled to our feet. I was worried, but not because the Syrian was half a head taller and outweighed me by fifty pounds. I feared that before we finished with this group, the rest of the terrorists would arrive. The blast from my StG had pinpointed our location.
The big Syrian, much stronger than I, jerked his knife-hand free from my grasp. He attempted a straight inward slash, at the same moment that I stepped back, twisted my wrist free and avoided the blade by sidestepping to the left rear. For a moment, my attacker was confused. A man used to brute force, he couldn't comprehend the subtler techniques of attack and defense.
As the Ghizu returned to its trajectory, my arms shot out, one going underneath his right elbow joint and pushing upward, the other catching his right wrist and pushing downward with every ounce of strength at my command. The elbow snapped. The man howled but didn't have time to put up any kind of defense. I followed the scissors break with a right lead leg shin kick and the Syrian fell flat on his face. Immediately I stomped on the back of his neck, breaking it.
Stepping away from the corpse, I spotted Cham Elovitz struggling with two of the enemy, but he didn't need any help. Cham succeeded in shoving the muzzle of his North Vietnamese MAT underneath one man's chin and pulled the trigger, the barrel spitting out half a dozen rounds of 7.62mm projectiles. With the dead man sagging, Elovitz used his left hand to stab the second Syrian in the face with the barrel of the MAT. The man screamed in pain, let go of Elovitz's right arm and stepped back. Elovitz instantly blew him away with a short burst of slugs to the chest, while Risenberg, struggling with yet another terrorist, finished off his opponent by cracking open the side of the man's head.