“Let’s go,” he said.
Three hundred yards away Swart raised his hand and said, “Not yet, not yet… let them get far enough away from the lorries…”
The driver sat hunched forward, fingers ready on the ignition key.
“Now!” said Swart.
The two cars accelerated away, tires howling, headlights glaring, anxious for maximum surprise before the men on the quay could recover.
The four Israelis stood transfixed, immobile with shock. Kahane responded first, thrusting the Uzi machine gun through the cab window and squeezing off a short burst that went hopelessly wide, ricocheting off the concrete quayside.
“What the hell’s happening!” screamed Grearson. “They were told not to shoot!”
“It’s not coming from the ship,” said Marinetti. “They’re firing from the dockside.”
Aboard the freighter, Evans shouted, “It’s a setup; I don’t know what’s happened, but it’s a setup. We’ll have to fight our way out.”
The men snatched their weapons from gunny sacks and holdalls. Hinkler and Bartlett immediately sprayed warning shots over the heads of the crew who had begun to move when they saw what was happening.
“Face them off,” Evans told Melvin.
On the quayside, the Israelis moved into action at last, trying to shield their aim from the blaze of the approaching lights, firing with their handguns. Kahane’s second burst was better than his first, shattering the windscreen of the second South African car. The inrush of glass blinded the driver who was also shot through the shoulder. He still had the instinct to haul the wheel to the left, to swerve away from the hurtling approach to the quay edge and the oily sea below. They smashed into the second Israeli lorry, the impact so violent that Habel was hurled out of the vehicle and shattered his skull against the bordering wall. The driver died instantly, together with the man beside him and one in the rear. The fourth broke his neck but retained consciousness, screaming out in immediate agony and then continuing wail after agonized wail.
The mercenaries were positioned well, protected by the metal of the freighter rail. Sneider sprayed the quay with automatic fire, which was taken up by Evans as soon as Sneider’s ammunition clip was exhausted. By the time Evans ran out for Jones to begin firing, Sneider had reloaded, ready to resume an uninterrupted hail of highcalibre bullets. Behind him Evans heard more shooting, close from Melvin, and then farther away from Hinkler and Bartlett. And then screams as the crew were brought down. The captain was a stupid bastard, he thought agaih. One of Jones’s bursts caught the protruding Israeli lorry, shattering the windscreen and decapitating Kahane. Then one of the rounds penetrated the fuel line, and the vehicle erupted in a violent white and orange explosion.
Swart’s car had slewed around thirty yards from the Israelis, and everyone had got out, using it for protection to shoot at the four men who were trying to crab sideways from their totally exposed position towards the comparative safety of the shed. Two had turned to answer the concentrated and calculated fire from the freighter, and as he watched Swart saw one, then the other, literally blasted off the ground from the avalanche of bullets.
And then the French ambush erupted.
The blackened quay was suddenly flooded with blinding white light as the supposedly broken shed lights and then at least ten more ancillary search beams were switched on.
Car and lorry headlights in a solid, practically unbroken line came on in unison to encircle the berth. In the sudden break in the shooting the clatter of squads of soldiers running was momentarily the only sound. From the sea as well as from inland a flurry of helicopters arrived, with more lights focusing downwards upon the fighting. And then the announcements demanding surrender, amplified metallic voices in French, then in English, saying that they were completely surrounded by police, antiterrorist squads, CRS and a French army detachment.
Calling Hinkler and Bartlett to the shore rail to join with Melvin and Sneider, Evans scurried with Jones, bent double, towards the bridge ladder. A crewman saw them and moved to intervene. The black man shot him almost carelessly, the automatic rifle balanced in his right hand. He waited until Evans had climbed to the top, then scrambled up after him. Side by side they dashed into the bridge housing. Papas was crouched rigid against the storm rail, staring down at the quayside battlefield. Evans snatched at his shoulder.
“Cast off!” he yelled. “Cut the line and get us out of here!”
Papas blinked, like a man awakening from a deep sleep.
“I said get us out of here!” repeated Evans. “Cut the mooring lines.”
“You’re mad,” said the Greek, broken-voiced. “Utterly mad. Don’t you imagine they’ll have sealed the harbour entrance against us. They’ve got helicopters overhead, soldiers on land. I can’t go anywhere.”
Evans swung around, absorbing at once the stupidity of his demand. Below, his men had started shooting again, but at once were answered by equally professional, coordinated fire, blasting out simultaneously from at least five different spots and scything into the ship’s side. Even with the protection of their elevation, Evans saw Hinkler clutch upwards and then fall backwards, his face pulped red. As he stood crying, Bartlett was hit.
“They’ve got a tripod-mounted cannon down there!” said Jones. “Nine-millimetre, at least.”
A phosphorous flare, then another, exploded lazily from a helicopter hovering directly above and floated gently down, completely illuminating the deck. At once, still from above, automatic fire rained down on them. Sneider and Melvin died instantly. And the already wounded and dying crewmen twitched and jumped under the relentless downpour.
“Bastards!” screamed Evans. He ran out onto the bridge wing, conscious of Jones behind him. Squinting against the light still above them, they both began firing, using the recoil blast of the overhead guns as markers. Suddenly there was an explosion more violent than that of the Israeli lorry, as their bullets caught a helicopter fuel tank. There was a red and black roar, a searing, skin-scorching blast of heat and then the helicopter plunged downwards, lodged for a moment at the very stem of the freighter and then toppled, hissing, into the sea.
Far below the two remaining Israelis ran forward, arms high above their heads in surrender. Leiberwitz was caught in the stomach by a blast from one of the French machine-gun emplacements, practically cutting him in two, before anyone realized what they were doing.
To the men around him beside the car, Swart shouted, “Stop firing. Stay down but keep your hands visible.”
On the bridge, Jones aimed at the quay but only managed a short burst before a second helicopter arrived, flattening them against the deck with its downdraught. It released a flare, which blinded them, so neither Evans nor Jones ever saw the momentary black flecks of the three dropped grenades set to five-second time fuses. The explosion killed both of them as well as Papas, and split the bridge wing from its main housing.
Grearson obeyed Marinetti’s instruction, keeping his hands visible and stretched out against the car dashboard when they were surrounded. Black, hooded figures hauled open the doors to drag them out.
Seconds before it happened, the lawyer said, distant-voiced, “What happened? For God’s sake, what happened?”
“We lost,” said Marinetti.
38
Levy’s concern was entirely for the boy, refusing to let Karen even look at his bloody cuts or the bruising until she had repeated and then repeated again his instructions on how to guide the police to the villa where Azziz was held.
“Sure you’ve got it right?” he said.
“Positive,” she said. “Now let me clean you up.”
Levy shook her off, his voice far away as if he couldn’t believe what he had done. “I had to leave him handcuffed to some piping in the cellar of some empty bloody house. He was crying, asking me to help him, and instead 1 walked away!”
Levy snatched the Browning automatic from the waistband of his trousers and slammed it onto a chest near the bedroom door. “I never want to see a bloody gun again,” he said.
“He’ll be all right,” said Karen. “I’ll see to it he’s all right. Please let me help you.”
