She is strong, Zuwayy thought. But they were wasting too much time with her. She was a novelty because she was a woman-one of the few captured-but it was too risky keeping a woman imprisoned in a place like this. 'Has she made any contact with any of the others?' Zuwayy asked the jailer. 'Talking, tap code, hand signs, anything?'
'No, Highness. When they were together, they did not even look at each other. They never tried to communicate.'
Very well-trained indeed. He examined her face once more. Her eyes were ready to roll back into her head; her tongue was swollen and almost black; and blood was seeping from her eyes, ears, and mouth. 'Get rid of her,' Zuwayy said. 'She's practically dead already. Bury her in the desert. The last thing we need is for her to be caught in here like this. Make it quick, and make it untraceable. I want to see the others.'
Zuwayy was almost out of the cell when he heard her mutter behind him-and it didn't sound like 'Help me, please' this time. He turned and went back to her. She had completely slumped against her chains now. He grabbed her hair and yanked her head up. 'What did you say, bitch? Repeat! What did you say?' She muttered something unintelligible. He put his ear as close as he dared to her lips. 'Speak up! What did you say?'
Through her cracked lips and swollen tongue, he heard her utter, 'M… Me… McLanahan,' just before she passed out again.
It was hard, steamy, sweaty work-no other way to describe it; and there was no other way to do it except virtually by hand. At first Patrick McLanahan spelled trie flight crew in the cockpit while the plane was being refueled — they had to use water pumps and fire hoses to get the fuel out of the underground storage tanks, and then gravityfeed it into each of the Megafortress's twelve fuel tanks. Patrick kept one engine running through the entire refueling just in case they came under attack and he had to start all the other engines, but he acknowledged to himself that there was almost no chance of getting the Megafortress off the ground unless they had at least twenty minutes' warning. But in about a day, the EB-52 Megafortress bomber was fully fueled.
King Idris the Second of Libya, Muhammad as-Sanusi, was nowhere to be seen until dawn, out on patrol all night with his 'Sandstorm' desert warriors. The effects of the electromagnetic pulse had subsided, so Sanusi could maintain radio contact with his men while taking a closer look at Mersa Matruh. 'The destruction is total, my friend,' he told Patrick after he returned, putting a hand on Patrick's sweat-bathed shoulder. 'The dead are everywhere-it is the most horrible sight I've ever seen. I know you told me it would be safe to go there, that the radiation dissipates almost immediately, but my men refused to go near the place, and I chose not to force them. I am truly sorry, McLanahan. Very sorry.' Patrick nodded-he was beyond feeling sorrow or despair. Once the Megafortress touched down on Jaghbub's runway, he was all business again. 'Very cool bird you have here, Mr. McLanahan,' he said. 'Unreal.'
'Thanks.'
'So you will be departing soon?'
'I assume that the Libyans will start getting curious about Jaghbub and send a force down from Tobruk or Benghazi to investigate,' Patrick said. 'I'll bet scouts are already on the way. The bomber needs to be gone by then. We can have a special-operations aircraft meet us here tonight to get us out of the country.'
'Well, we're as ready as we can be,' Sanusi said. 'My men picked up some shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles from their underground arsenal, and we've taken them out so we might have a chance of tagging an attack helicopter or two before it gets close enough to lob a missile in on us.'
Patrick didn't like hearing that. 'What will you do, Your Highness?'
'I need enough time to cart the weapons away, that's all,' Sanusi said. 'I've called for all the men I can muster, but they won't start filtering in for several hours. Once they get here, I'll load up as many weapons and as much fuel as I can carry, then head off to our desert bases. But we know Zuwayy's scouts will be back here before long-like you said, they could be here tomorrow morning, or even tonight.' He paused, then nodded at the EB-52 Megafortress. 'We sure could use your little toy there to help us hold off the heavies.'
It was risky-too risky. The EB-52 had enough fuel to make it to Scotland, where a Sky Masters Inc. DC-10 I aircraft could meet them to refuel and take them back to the States. Jon Masters used to have secret deals with the British government to use their facilities in emergencies-perhaps that still held true. Bottom line: They had a pretty good chance of making it out of here if they got out tonight.
But Patrick also knew that angry Libyan soldiers could surround Muhammad Sanusi and his men any minute now. He couldn't just leave these guys to their fate. He spoke: 'Patrick to Luger.'
'Go ahead, Muck,' David Luger responded. Sanusi shook his head and again silently marveled at the technology these Americans possessed.
'Let's get the Megafortress uploaded with target information for Zillah Air Base and Al-Jawf Rocket Base,' Patrick said. 'We'll have to use the intel we got from the Egyptians.'
'It's several days old, and a lot of shit has happened since then,' Luger pointed out.
'I don't think we have any choice,' Patrick said. 'Time's running out. We need to…' Just then Sanusi received a frantic call on his portable radio. 'Stand by, Dave.'
'I'm afraid time may have run out already,' Sanusi said. 'My scouts reported a convoy of four tanks af?d five armored personnel carriers heading south. They're about forty kilometers north of here, coming fast. They have also seen several helicopter patrols heading this way, but they have lost contact.'
'Low-level helicopters-could be attackers,' Patrick said. 'Dave, let's get the Megafortress ready to launch. Me, Chris, and Hal will have to go out with the king and his men and see what we can do, but if the helicopters get past us, the Megafortress will fight better in the air.'
The Sanusi Brotherhood 'Sandstorm' warriors raced across the desert at full throttle in their jeeps and Humvees, leaping up and over sand dunes and gullies at more than sixty miles an hour. If they encountered a minefield, Patrick was sure they'd never set any mines off because they hardly touched earth at all. They passed the remains of one Mil Mi-8 helicopter gunship, downed by one of the warriors with a Stinger shoulder-fired missile; a few kilometers away, they found the remains of the warriors and their vehicle, blasted apart into a twisted hunk of burning metal and human tissue.
'Sorry about your men, Your Highness,' Chris Wohl offered over the roar of their speeding vehicle. 'They took on a gunship and defeated it.'
'I wish I could say that their death made a difference, or that they will find peace in God's hands as a reward,' Muhammad as-Sanusi said. 'All I can tell their families and their fellow warriors is that they died trying to win back a kingdom we all believe in so much. All the others can hope for is the chance that their death might rally others to our cause. We shall see.'
They proceeded another few miles until they met up with one of the Sanusi Brotherhood patrols on a slight rise, about two miles west of the Tobruk-Jaghbub highway. From there they crawled over to the edge of the rise, where they could see the oncoming Libyan scouts approaching, now about five miles away.
'I think I found the one thing this battle armor doesn't do very well-you can't fight very well on sand,' Hal
Briggs observed. 'You sure as hell can't crawl around with it, and the thrusters don't work very well unless you find a patch of hard-packed sand.'
'All true-that's why we can't fight like the king does,' Patrick said. 'Your Highness, I recommend you stay in hiding and keep an eye out for newcomers or anyone who tries to escape. We'll engage-our way.'
'We could use a few of those tanks and armored personnel carriers, Tor,' Sanusi said, using his new nickname for Patrick in his battle armor, 'Tor,' meaning 'bull.' 'Try not to destroy all of them, my friend.' Patrick nodded and moved off. Patrick had Hal circle around to cross over to the east side of the highway, keeping Chris on the west side. Patrick took the middle-the highway itself.
The line of Libyan armor was following the highway but staying well off of it, spread out about a mile either side of the highway. The armored vehicles stayed on the roadthey were wheeled, not tracked-with gunners at the ready in the cupolas. The armored vehicles had AT-2 antitank missiles fitted out on the front of the vehicles along with a fifty-seven-millimeter rapid-fire cannon and a 12.7-millimeter machine gun for the commander; the tanks were ex-Russian T-60s with one-hundred-ten-millimeter main guns. They were not moving very quickly-they were probably playing it cautious after losing contact with their helicopter gunship.
The commander of the lead armored vehicle was surprised to see a lone figure standing in the middle of the highway when he crested the slight rise in the highway. He was standing right there, not moving or attempting to
