The Chor-7’s driver floored his gas pedal to catch Cody before he made it to the wall. This accelerated bouncing across the rough landscape from the direction of the front gate made it too rough a ride for the gunner to attain anything near good aim.
A spray of projectiles whanged by, well over Cody’s head.
The driver of the jeeplike vehicle saw him whirl around, toward the Chor-7. Instead of coming on straight in at Cody, the driver yanked his steering wheel to drive sideways alongside Cody, supposedly to give the machine gunner a better field of fire.
The maneuver gave Cody a better sideways target. He tugged one of the grenades from the webbing across his chest, bit the pin lexxse, and pitched it at that Chor-7. The grenade scored a bull’s-eye into the front of the Chor-7, which passed him.
He turned to continue toward the wall. The grenade detonated with a bang that sounded not too loud after all the major fireworks going on. The jeep went out of control and then just petered to a stop, its occupants flopping this way and that in attitudes of torn death. Cody reached the wall, flung the rope, and heaved himself up it.
The barracks building blew up behind him as noisily as the first. He reached the top of the wall and yanked the rope up after himself. He saw the BTR-60 they had driven from Sofia. He tossed one glance back.
The headshed of Colonel Vronski’s KGB base was a burning, crazed confusion.
It would be awhile before any more terrorist gangs like Abdul Kamal and his bunch used this spot to run to for cover.
Everywhere he looked he saw destruction: the burning mansion; the rubble of the motor pool; fallen bodies; men running everywhere, it seemed, except toward this point of the wall where the armored car waited. According to plan, all of it.
He felt a surge of well-being as he dropped from the wall to the ground. The feeling of a job well done. He ran to the BTR-60, tugged open the door on the driver’s side, and climbed in.
He slammed his door shut after himself. Caine sat next to him in the front passenger seat, Murphy wedged behind the turreted machine gun … and Hawkeye, stretched out flat on his back, looking pale, grabbing at .his left leg with both hands, not making a sound.
The leg was twisted at a wrong angle.
Cody put the personnel carrier into gear, steering up onto the road, wheeling in the direction of Sofia.
“Bloody good thing our Texan friend here has the luck of a dozen Irishmen,” Caine commented.
“I’ll sing my own blues, limey,” Hawkeye grunted from his prone position. “Just a nick across the leg, Sarge, but the damn thing knocked me off-balance and—”
“Man, you were born off-balance,” Murphy ribbed from behind the machine gun. “The turkey fell from the wall, Sarge, and broke his leg. I say we dock his pay if he’s not up to seeing this gig through.”
“Hell, it takes more’n a busted leg to slow down a Hawkins!” Hawkeye protested.
Cody looked at the broken leg.
“You’re a good man, Hawkeye,” he said, chuckling. ““But you’re out for the rest of this one.”
“Aw, mule piss,” the Texan grumbled, more irritated than in pain, as if the bullet wound and the broken leg were invonveniences best ignored.
“What did you find in there?” Caine asked with a nod back at the estate.
Cody told them about the subjects of this hunt giving them the slip again and about the possible lead he had picked up from the notepad in Vronski’s office.
“Edri,” said Caine. “Why, that’s in Libya. In the deep desert. The Sahara.”
“Hell’s bells and greased lightning,” Murphy grunted. “We’re hitting all the hot spots on this one, aren’t we?”
Cody could only nod.
Libya.
It made sense.
Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Kaddafi was as much a mainspring force behind international terrorism as was the KGB
A blood-red ball that was the sun inched its way above the peaks to the east.
A new day. A new destination.
Libya.
Damn and double damn.
Hawkeye emitted the smallest groan of pain as the BTR-60 bumped over a portion of ill-kept road on its way back down onto the plateau surrounding Sofia.
“Can you hold out, Hawkeye?” he asked over his shoulder.
“We could reconnect with Narda,” Caine suggested. “She’d know a safe medic.”
“Since when did I start looking like a walking pussy?” the Texan grumbled irritably. “You guys don’t remember that firefight we got into on the way back from Dong Hoi?”
“Yeah, yeah, we remember it, superman,” Murphy said with a snort. “That time it was a hunk of shrapnel in your ass, as I recall.”
Hawkeye crossed his arms behind his head as a pillow and did his best to look comfortable.
“So this time you guys carry me,” he said, chuckling with what could best be described as a shit-eating grin.
“We’re not carrying you into Libya, Hawkeye.” Cody chuckled at his buddy’s spunk. “You’re going to sit this one out.”
Hawkins lost some of his make-believe good humor.
“Okay, okay, but don’t expect me to like it.”
“We had best find another mode of transportation,” Caine noted, his eyes nervously panning from watching the terrain around them to the rearview mirror mounted on his door, eyeing behind them.
“We’ll requisition the first private vehicle we see,” Cody nodded. “Then we’ll contact the CIA station at the American embassy in Sofia. According to Lund, they’re supposed to be waiting to hear from us with a way out of Bulgaria.”
“We’ll need to ditch this sucker fast,” said Caine, “There aren’t all that many private vehicles in Bulgaria, and excuse me for pointing it out, Rufe, but your persuasion does, er, tend to stick out in our present surroundings.”
“It sure ain’t Mississippi,” Murphy agreed glumly.
“We’ll make it,” Cody grunted. “We’ve got to make it. Kamal and Vronski are giving us a good run for our money, but this isn’t over yet.”
“I hear that.” Murphy nodded from behind his machine gun. “Fact is, something tells me we’re just about to move into high gear.”
“Look out, Libya,” Caine grunted to no one special. “Break out the guns and bolt the doors. Cody’s Army is coming.”
Vronski hated Libya the minute he saw it from the air as their plane had approached Tripoli airport in a banking curve that gave him his first look at the white-stone metropolis hugging the blinding blue of the Mediterranean beneath an aching white sky.
The baking afternoon heat had slapped him across the face before he took his first step from the air-conditioned plane, and he instantly knew that everything he had read and heard about this North African sand pit of a country was too true.
He had never been beyond the region of the small town where he had been born and raised, south of Smolensk, until mandatory army service snatched him in his teens, and since then he had never been back. He had seen a fair amount of the world, none of which had compared to his home. But he had never gone back, had never wanted to go back. His family was dead. Vronski had long ago stopped thinking of any place as home, his life one duty station alter another. There were profits to be made, retirement one day, though he made it a point to consider his future even less than his past. And for the present, one hellhole after another. Bonn, of course, had not been bad. Afghanistan had been the anus of the universe his enemies in the bureaucracy had know it to be when they sent him there. Sofia… well, Bulgaria had been somewhere in between.
But Libya… Before he had passed through the terminal to the VIP section, Vronski knew this would be the worst of all. Worse than Kabul—far worse.
The Afghans had been despicable barbarians, uncivilized, uneducated, unwashed specimens of a lower rung on the evolutionary scale, all of those things; but at least they were an occupied people who understood who the superior race was, the power to be obeyed.
Libya?
It belonged to the desert lice who infested its unlivable terrain.
Everywhere in the airport was the upraised babble of traditionally garbed Arabs.
Vronski understood most North African dialects, part of his training by the KGB based on the assumption and Vronski concurred, that the future of the world for generations to come would be determined in this part of the world, and before a man could attain Vronski’s rank, he had to be fluent in such languages.
So Vronski knew that he was being talked about as Kamal led the way around the customs booths, through a less crowded but still very busy part of the terminal.
Vronski had heard himself discussed every step of the way, since the Libyans they passed on their way through the terminal spoke to each other openly in their own tongue, assuming that this foreigner did not know their language. He heard the workers and the others call him names among themselves and discuss how one day nonbelievers would not blaspheme this land with their presence.
He strode with Kamal slightly in the lead, the Arab pretending not to hear, though Vronski thought he detected the slightest sneer upon Kamal’s face when he overheard bits and pieces of passing conversation. They strode out the far side of the smallish, extravagantly modern terminal.
Impudent filth, Vronski thought, and not just of Kamal. They would have to be conquered. And they would be. Perhaps not in his lifetime, but it could be no other way. For now, though, they ruled themselves, worshiping at the feet of a leader too dangerous to go unchecked for much longer. But Vronski told himself that he had no choice but to follow orders.
Kamal led the way out to where a limousine waited for them. A driver had their luggage already stowed in the rear, and soon they had wended their way out of the city, beyond the bazaars and the crowded streets and the larger-than-life posters and banners of Kaddafi staring down from nearly every available pole and wall.
They passed the green-painted square adjacent to the port crowded with Soviet ships and drove a half hour south of the city, into the desert where they linked up with the twin-engine bush plane. Now it flew them high over the desert, toward Edri.
As usual, no conversation had passed between Vronski and Kamal for hours.
Vronski rapidly lost interest in the numbing sameness of the flat tabletop sea of sand below them. The window of the plane was hot to the touch.
The desolation, uninhabitable except for nomadic Bedouin herders like those they had flown over tending their flock near one of the few oases, stretched forever in every direction.
Vronski lurched where he sat and realized that he had dozed off. He felt oddly embarrassed, but Kamal appeared lost in his own thoughts, staring out at the desert as the plane flew through the midday sky.
“It is beautiful, is it not, Colonel?”
Vronski blinked away his sluggishness, borne, he knew, of the hundred-and twenty-degree heat that permeated the plane despite the air conditioning.
“What’s that?”
“The desert,” said Kamal.
“It is a place of death,” Vronski snarled irritably.
“It is a place where only the strong survive,” Kamal countered. He looked at Vronski. “How does it feel, Colonel? Now you know how it has been for me, to live and travel in Bulgaria and Italy and your world.”
“I have no interest in how you feel, Abdul,” Vronski snapped, “and less in sharing any feelings I may have with you.’’
“Quite so.” Kamal smiled oily vacuousness. “I only wish you to know that / know, Colonel.”
“Eh, and what is it you know?”
“This is my world. You would do well to remember that.”
“And why should I? Do you seek to intimidate me?”
“Hardly that,” the Arab said, demurring. “I only trust you to remember, when we get to the camp at Edri, that here in Libya we are associates.”
“Are we not so in Bulgaria?”
Kamal paused a moment, then returned to gazing out of the window.
Vronski felt an itchiness in the palm of his right hand. He knew then how badly he wished he could unholster his pistol and blow this despicable sand crab’s head off his shoulders. He told himself that the time would come.
Kamal, much like Kaddafi himself, was far too quirky to be an ideal Soviet client, but just as Kaddafi gave the Kremlin a beachhead in the Middle East, Kamal provided Vronski with the means by which the KGB’s ends could be achieved, and for the time Kamal would have to be put up with, and with Kamal’s force devastated by the Italian roundup of the Rome cell and the losses suffered at the American embassy, this was the place to come to replenish the ranks. Though it irked him to admit it, Vronski knew that, as Kamal had not so subtly pointed out, the KGB was no longer in charge here.
He told himself to quell his feelings. Kamal knew he did not care for him, to put it mildly, and the feelings were decidedly mutual. In Sofia, Vronski was in charge—they both knew it—but the best way to conclude this odious assignment quickly and efficiently was to allow Kamal to think that he was an equal. He would leave all recruiting of terrorists to the terrorist. He was along to advise and observe.
When they returned to Sofia with Kamal’s new squad, Vronski would reassume the dominant role no matter what Kamal wished to tell himself, and one day soon another would fill Kamal’s position, but for now …
And yet he saw no reason to give this despicable creature the final word.
“This may be your world, Abdul, but is your world safe from John Cody and his men?”
Kamal brought his attention around fast enough for Vronski to know that he had struck a nerve.
“The camp at Edri is far more secure than your base at Padomir ever was, Colonel. The whole area around the camp for kilometers is heavily patrolled by jeeps, men on camel and horseback, even several of your T-55 tanks patrolling the desert constantly. Not a scorpion could approach the camp across the ground without detection and certain annihilation.”
“You perhaps forget that the base at Padomir was meant to be a secret base. I would not feel so secure if I were you. The American statellites have a spy capability beyond that of even the Soviet Union, it pains me to say.”
“Bah, so their satellites see a collection of tents and trailers in the desert.” Kamal waved a hand. “Why should it be anything more than an oil company compound’.’ We arc safe from Cody in Libya.”
“I suspect you may be right. There is no way he could trace us to Edri from Padomir. I destroyed every bit of written information that could lead anyone here after us.”
Without another word, Kamal returned to mooning over his beloved wasteland.
Vronski thought some more about John Cody and what had happened at Padomir.
The word had reached him in transit.
Cody had led an armed assault force of about thirty men, according to the account Vronski received from one of his officers who had survived the attack.
He had half expected, after having heard what happened at Charova’s warehouse, that Cody might track him and Kamal to Padomir, but he had not expected it to happen so quickly. He would file protest with his superiors in Moscow concerning the National Freedom Organization. He was sure that the NFO had given Cody and his men assistance. It could be no other way. The underground would have to be dealt with more severely, more steps taken to crush what semblance of resistance had managed to endure this long, but there would be time enough for that when they returned to Sofia.
And by that time, he assured himself, Cody would be long gone from the Balkans. The American government would never sanction a combat unit to operate indefinitely in an Eastern bloc nation.
That is what will happen, Vronski told himself. Cody and his men will have no option but to abort their crazed chase after reaching a dead end at Padomir, and Vronski had to admit to himself that he was just as glad to be out of Bulgaria for the period of time it would take he and Kamal to transact their business at the terrorist training camp.
He would also file a full report on Cody to Moscow from the base. They had to be made aware that the man was back in his government’s service.
Cody would have to be dealt with aggressively. He and his team would be terminated with extreme prejudice.
He wished this would happen before he had any further encounters with John Cody. They had never met, and yet Vronski knew that this man was his mortal enemy from this point forward. Either Cody or Vronski would have to die at the other’s hand. Kamal had stated it best in Sofia, he recalled: “It could be no other way.”
“We approach the base,” said Kamal.
Vronski looked out and down beyond the plane’s Plexi-glas at the gathering of thick-trunked, tall date palms wafting in the scorching wind ahead and the collection of tents and trailers ringed on three sides by long, gracefully sloping sand dunes.
Edri.
A finishing school for terrorists, put plainly and simply, where committed fanatics of all stripes and nationalities come to learn state-of-the-art techniques from Soviet, Libyan, and Cuban instructors in everything from refined methods of torture to strategies for plane and boat hijackings to the more refined aspects of international terrorism, such as exploitation of the mass media and dealing with trained negotiators.
The camp functioned under the sponsorship and protection of Kaddafi’s government but with full Soviet approval and support, and Vronski knew that at present this camp, literally in the “middle of nowhere,” hosted representatives from such diverse groups as the Palestinian factions, from which Kamal would draw his recruits, but also men ranging from the Irish Republican Army to Central American leftists to Basque and Corsican separatists to Moro guerrillas from the Philippines.
Hardly the best of company under the worst of circumstances, thought Vronski.
The small plane banked for its approach to the motley collection of trailers and tents shimmering beneath the brassy sun.