searching, hoping to find some of the SAM-7 missiles responsible for downing the Air Force jet.
He found no antiaircraft missiles. He reopened the crate of RPGs, loaded a launcher. He went to the corpses and checked their pockets. He buzzed his partners. 'I got two frags. I'll bounce them past you. Make your move after the second one, I'll cover...'
'Do it!' Gadgets shouted the length of the hall. 'Stop talking! We got to get out of here!'
A grenade bounced past Gadgets, continued to the end of the hall. Covering his ears, Gadgets crouched down beside Mohammed. The blast ricocheted tiny bits of steel off the ceiling and walls and floor. The rifle fire started up again.
The three men sprinted through the dust and smoke. Gadgets saw Lyons crouching outside a door. Did he have a rifle or what?
Sliding on the tiles, jarring into Lyons, Gadgets took cover inside, reached back to grab Mo-man, then Blancanales. The AKs down the hall fired wild.
A shrieking flame answered.
The gift from the Soviet Union rocked the building, but now, instead of murdering Israeli children or housewives, the warhead vaporized the group of fanatics cowering behind a two-foot-thick brick wall.
'Superior firepower,' Lyons shouted as he reloaded and recocked the Russian weapon. 'Taxi driver. Read what's on those boxes. Any of those SAM-7s?'
'No antiaircraft missiles,' Mohammed told them. 'Only infantry weapons.'
'Rockets for everyone,' Lyons ordered. 'Get with it! We got to search this hellhole. Room by room.'
In the crates, they found vests that served as load-bearing equipment for carrying rockets. The vests looked like bibs with long pockets in the front. The four men slipped into the vests, crammed rockets in the huge pockets. Gadgets and Mohammed took launchers. They went to the door.
Gadgets turned to Blancanales and Lyons. 'What happens if we fire these point-blank?'
'Don't know…'
'Don't!' Mohammed told them. 'A friend did in Lebanon.'
'Move it,' Lyons said. 'Find those SAM-7s and we go home.'
Stepping to the doorway, Mohammed stayed behind the shelter of the wall and fired diagonally across the hall. Backblast seared the apartment's wall. The blast itself sent chunks of brick bouncing through the hallway.
Gadgets went next, leaning into the hallway, firing at the back apartment. Heavy with weapons and rockets, they rushed into the swirling dust and smoke. Pausing only to check on the position of their partners, Gadgets and Mohammed fired rockets continually, reloading on the run.
Vast holes appeared in apartment walls. Rushing through doorways, they looked for more of the Russian- marked crates. They found none. The other rooms held only personal possessions of the terrorist group. They saw walls covered with posters of Khomeini and Arafat and the red, white, green and black flag of the PLO.
Flames licked from burning furnishings. Through the smoke, Mohammed saw a movement in a doorway. He ran to the door, shoved the launcher out at arm's length and fired blind. The explosion in the apartment threw Blancanales back against the wall.
Slugs punched the wall next to Blancanales's head. Lyons spotted a form in the smoke, fired an Uzi in each hand.
'Down!' Gadgets shouted out. 'Rocket ready!'
The others went flat as Gadgets dodged from a doorway and fired the RPG from his hip.
The rocket's explosion sheared away a wall, smashed out a back wall.
Blancanales crawled forward to glance into the last apartment. He saw only a torso and legs remaining of the gunman. Scanning the apartment quickly, he spotted no shipping crates.
'No rockets in there. Maybe the old man meant the RPGs.'
'Ironman,' Gadgets called over to him. 'Time to get out of here! The Egyptians will call out the army!'
'Not yet. We'll search the other rooms on the floor, get out over the roofs.'
'Those rockets! Look!' Mohammed shouted. He stood at a hole in the wall, gazing down at the alley behind the apartment building.
Evening air cooled their faces as they all looked down. They saw teenagers scrambling over a truck. Some of the young men waved AK rifles at onlookers to warn them back, others struggled to cover the rack of rocket tubes on the back of the truck with a black tarp.
'Dig that,' Mohammed laughed. 'A Katyusha. That's what that mullah saw…'
The truck carried a rack of forty 122mm rocket-launching tubes. Though capable of raining a salvo of high explosives on a target, the rockets of a 'Stalin's Organ' flew like artillery shells, without infrared or radar-homing warheads. A Katyusha presented no threat to high-flying aircraft.
'Wrong rockets, wrong goddamn place,' Lyons cursed.
'As long as we're here anyway…' Gadgets pulled off the safety cap of an RPG, cocked the launcher's hammer. 'Stand back for backblast!'
Leaning through the shattered bricks, Gadgets sighted on the rack of rocket tubes and pulled the trigger. The flash lighted the night. 'Katyusha out of order!' Mangled terrorists flew from the flaming truck. Bystanders scattered, though Gadgets had known his aim was sure enough to avoid reckless endangerment.
A blast threw them back. Shock rocked the floor and walls. Sections of ceiling fell. As Blancanales hit the heaving floor, he saw the rear wall of the apartment building fall away. A wave of flame rushed upward. The night returned for an instant, then another sheet of flame roared up.
Gadgets lay on the floor, stunned. Blancanales grabbed him by the coat sleeve to drag him back.
'Secondaries! This is not the place to be!'
Mohammed took Gadgets's other arm. Lyons rose to his feet. He staggered with an Uzi in his right hand and another Uzi dangling by a strap from his left wrist.
'Come on! The building's falling!' Blancanales shoved Lyons over to Mohammed the taximan. 'Move him out of here.'
'Hey, it's been a blast. But we gotta go!'
Another explosion brought down more plaster and bricks. A slab of plaster broke over Lyons's shoulders. He shrugged off the white dust, staggered after the others, steadying himself with his left hand against the wall. Blood streamed from his hair, flowed down his face. Mohammed glanced back at him, grabbed his arm and helped him toward the stairs.
'You all right, man? You ready to go up those stairs?'
'The rockets are here,' Lyons gasped, the Uzi clattering against the wall. 'They're here someplace.'
'We got their rockets! So forget about finding any more, okay? Please? We hit any more rockets in this place, we check in El Motel Allah.'
'I mean, in Cairo. In Cairo. The rockets are in Cairo.' He staggered, blew blood off his lip. 'Somewhere.'
10
Through the thick bullet-resistant glass of the limousine window, tinted gray to block out the desert glare and the gaze of the common people, the lights became abstract patterns of amber and pale blue. Katz watched the distorted images of the Cairo night float past as he listened to Sadek and Parks.
The young CIA officer, his face unshaven and lined, eyes red with fatigue, talked quietly with the bored, always-dapper Sadek. They reviewed notes, cross-checking names and addresses against a map of the greater Cairo area.
'I understand the restraints on your personnel, but we must have information on the government employees at the airport.'
'It will take weeks,' Sadek repeated. 'We do not investigate individuals simply because they express sympathy for these groups or their ideals. We respect religious expression.'
'Religious expression? Mobs screaming 'Death to the Great Satan'? Let's start with the workers from the
