Anders raised the pocketscope again. Jaffe rested the weight of the nightscope on the dune's crest. Men had emerged from the darkness and the folds of the landscape. Anders drew in his breath. Seven of them.
'Do they know?'
'You know the answer — yes. We estimate no more than five in the Mil-A, just the crew of two in the D escort. I hope those two babies are just what you want — this bazaar is closing down after tonight.' Jaffe grinned; white teeth in the hard moonlight.
Anders shook his head as if to loosen the burrlike grip of the words on his memory and awareness. His body was weak with tension, as if he were lying in sexual exhaustion, spread-eagled on the sand.
Slowly, the alien, dangerous corner of southern Lebanon became itself again as he watched Jaffe's unit, in Arab disguises and speaking Arabic, their officer with enough Farsi to initially beguile the Iranian waiting for their return; enough to converge without alarm with the waiting terrorist.
Two of the unit appeared to be wounded, leaning heavily against others of the group. Anders had seen some of the final rehearsals, but there was no sense of
Fifteen yards of sand and rock now separated the group from the terrorist who waited impatiently for them. He called, and Anders heard a muffled, out-of-breath explanation. Eleven yards, ten, eight…
It all seemed huge and in slow motion, like the collision of two great prehistoric creatures. He could hear his own quick, shallow breathing and the little expelled grunts of tension from Jaffe. In his memory, the directors voice possessed a similar tense breathlessness.
Fear jolted Anders' mind back to the present. The terrorist might sense the strangeness of this approaching group, even behind their scarves and burnooses. Anders flicked his infrared, one-eyed gaze toward the helicopters. The image of them in the gray mistiness provided by the lens made him twitch with nerves. He felt stretched by the succession of moments. At no point until it was completed, until they had been successful, would he be able to feel they might not fail utterly. There was no relief, no escape.
He could see faces staring up toward the top of the cliff. What would they see? Might they not see…?
'OK, OK, OK,' Jaffe was muttering, the earpiece clamped against his face, his head nodding even as he squinted through the nightscope. 'OK, OK.'
Anders switched the pocketscope to the group on the clifftop. Arms now akimbo in welcome, AKM held harmlessly away from the Iranian's body — three yards. Three steps.
Warm greeting, still relief in the terrorist's tones, even in the moment the group leader embraced him—
Small twitch of the whole body as the knife, blade darkened so as not to catch the moonlight, went in. A hand over the Iranian's mouth to prevent a cry, then the unit leader was holding the body upright, turning it… Anders watched, unable to breathe. Another embrace and — yes! — the exchange was completed. One of the pretend- wounded had straightened, begun to walk beside the unit leader in place of the Iranian. Chattering excitedly, his arm around the shoulders of the unit leader in welcome.
The whole group, in single file, began to thread its way down a dry gully into the hollow in the dunes. They were fifty or sixty yards from the two MiLs. Jaffe exhaled noisily, his tension almost as palpable as smoke in the chill air. The two pilots would already have completed their prestart checks. Anders had heard the hum of the auxiliary power units for the past — how long? It did not matter. He knew the MiLs were ready for an immediate engine- start. The moments lengthened, giving no comfort, only prospects of failure.
'Easy now, boys, easy now, easy,' Jaffe murmured beside him, almost lovingly.
They were approaching the helicopters from the rear, moving slowly but seeming to Anders to rush toward failure. He could witness the whole scene now through the monocular eyepiece of the pocketsight. Gray, misty light. Rotors unmoving as yet. The terrorist's dead feet were dragging through the sand, his body supported by a man on either side. Anders noticed guns now. Kalashnikovs and Uzi submachine guns held loosely, slung easily. Forty yards to the MiLs.
Noise. Shattering, unnerving. Engine-start. The rotors moved, began to shimmer in the moonlight. Dust lifted but visibility was not obscured, only shadowed as the pilots held the rpm of the rotors at ground-idling speed. The Israeli unit moved closer as the MiLs appeared to tremble like cold dogs down in the hollow. When they lifted away there would be—
The Israelis would have only seconds before the torque wound up, the rotors were placed in their lift angle of incidence, and the MiLs moved up and away, escaping them. The timing, rehearsed a hundred, two hundred times, was critical.
Twenty-five yards. Another of the Iranians was out of the door of the 24A now, waving the group to hurry. The pilots were becoming impatient now that the MiLs were noisier, audible in the night. It had taken two weeks to bring about this conjunction of a special Israeli commando unit and two Russian gunships. Objective: capture intact, whatever the human cost. Two Israeli helicopter pilots waited in the dunes, a quarter of a mile away, ready and briefed to fly the captured gunships over the border to the waiting Galaxy transport that would hurry them back to the States. Where Gant and his crews would have perhaps two weeks to learn to fly them before they set out for — for the target of their reach-and-recover mission. Objective: agent Cactus Plant alive, proof intact.
Fifteen yards, waving arms and hooded faces. Exclamations in Farsi. The Islamic Jihad group had been under Israeli surveillance for a long time, operating against Christian and Israeli forces in southern Lebanon and northern Israel; periodic long-stay incursions, piling up the raids, the bombs, the bodies. Always, they were transported to and from their base in eastern Syria by Mil helicopters flown by Russian pilots.
It had taken days to break just one of them and to obtain the signals, the IDs, the codes, timings, landing fields, next pickup point. Days…
Anders shuddered. Stepping out of the Galaxy, he at once became part of it, and driven by his own demons of urgency and desperation, utterly without innocence. Even so, he did not want to consider the Iranian who had been broken and the others destroyed but still silent.
Eleven yards, ten—
He felt his whole frame trembling against the fine sand that had compacted beneath him. Jaffe's hand clamped on his arm, not to steady his nerves but to communicate a similar tense excitement. So many rehearsals…
The director and the President disappeared from his mind like half-remembered performers in a long-ago play. Fear of failure, desperation, nerves all became immediate, transmuted into pure adrenaline as he watched the drama's second act begin.
The pilot and gunner were clearly visible, shadowy bulks in the cockpit of the 24D. They were watching the approach of the unit in their mirrors. Pilot and copilot of the 24A side by side, also watching. There were so many eyes! The slow, broken shimmer of the idling rotors reflected the moonlight like two great, damaged mirrors. Sand scuttled and puffed, but the visibility remained too good. What if—? So many unfamiliarities of detail between remembered comrades and this unit — shape, height, voice, walk, posture. They'd see something any moment now. The noise from the engines and the whip of rotors might not be enough to hide strangeness in expected voices, words—
Anders was aware of the stubby wings of the two MiLs; rocket pods and missiles were slung beneath them, all ironically pointing at the dune that hid Jaffe and himself. Wheels creaked against the restraint of brakes.
Seven yards, six, four—
